The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

1) Florida, I think - Jacksonville proper is huge.

2) I guess you mean crossing water with no bridge? Let's say Alaska, Maryland, Virginia...Georgia?

3) Chile, and...Suwetoland.

Jacksonville is No. 3 -- another state has the two biggest incorporated municipalities.

Alaska as a whole is an exclave from the rest of the continental U.S. -- you have to pass over water and/or through another country (Canada) to reach it from the rest of the U.S. There are three states besides Alaska which have areas of which this is true (in other words, not islands off the coast, but connected by land to another country while not being connected to yours). Should have made the and/or part more clear.

None of the others you mention are among them.

For #3, no (Chile borders 3 countries) and no (you are thinking of Lesotho, which is 3x the size of the correct answer.)

...

Let's...say...you can only get to some part of the state of Washington by either hopping up through Canada or swimming.

and Minnesota.

and Wisconsin.

1) Well, California?

3) South Korea.

Where is everybody?

1. The last time I looked at a list of the biggest cities in the US, I was flabbergasted by the number of cities in TX that had crept into the list (i.e., Houston, San Antonio, Dallas). Try that.

2. Well, Michigan's UP might count as an exclave. You know, I would imagine that Malaysia has an exclave or two, but we're talking US, right? How about New York state -- is there something like this up by Niagara Falls? Third guess is Missouri (or Kansas) because there just is something strange about East Saint Louis, as I recall.

3. Norway? Swaziland?

1. My memory is that Nashville is very large in area, so I'll guess Tennessee.

3. For smallest country in Africa, Gambia, bordered by Senegal? For second-largest country only bordering one nation, Papua New Guinea?

No one has yet figured out the main answer to No. 1; to reiterate -- Boxjam guessed Jacksonville, FL; that's the third-largest incorporated city, but another state has both the No.1 and No.2.

Boxjam has whittled away at No. 2 -- Washington has a tiny exclave in the Northwestern corner of the state, called Point Roberts. It's separated from the rest of Washington by Boundary Bay but is reachable from Canada by land. Similarly, the "Northwest Angle" in Minnesota's Lake of the Woods has no land connection to the U.S. except through Canada. And of course, Alaska is one big exclave. One other U.S. state has an exclave community.

Scraps contributes all the correct details to No. 3: Papua New Guinea is surprisingly large, almost within the top 50 nations for acreage. At about 463,000 square kilometers, it's the biggest single-border nation aside from Canada. Gambia or "The Gambia", is completely surrounded on the land side by Senegal, making the tiny country a sort of peninsula in political-geographical terms.

Well, I thought sure #1 would be Texas, since Houston is reputed to lasso any development out in the ranchland and call that incorporated. Since apparently it's not, and since it's not Florida either (Miami/Dade County) and not California, where Los Angeles claims water rights to land as far away as Nevada, I'll guess Virginia, with Richmond's whittling away at Henrico County.
2. Maine?

No and no.

Hmph.
1) Wyoming
2) Wisconsin

Nope.

For the last state, maybe some part of Vermont is on the other side of the river, there, so it really should be Canada but Canadians are nice about that sort of thing.

1) North Dakota
2) South Dakota
Oh, wait; you said this would make me unpopular.

Maybe the largest unincorporated area would be Anna Nicole Smith's estate, and the enclave would be Kevin Federline, given that you have to cross through Britney Spears to get to him.
Popularity, here I come.

Actually, I should have emended that statement to read "will make you unpopular with the whole One Guess Per Comment for America Society."

Since the last meeting was adjourned directly after the end of the last tournament, and the body shows no indications that it's likely to reconvene soon, I wouldn't worry about it.

Remaining answers: Boxjam is correct: Alburgh, Vermont, which is on the southern portion of a peninsula sticking down into Lake Champlain from Quebec, is an exclave, although it can be reached from the U.S. via bridges.

Alaska is the state with the two biggest incorporated municipalities: The Borough and City of Sitka and Juneau
both have more than 2700 square miles of incorporated land (this doesn't even include the additional couple thousand of miles of water which Sitka's borders take in).

Jacksonville, by contrast, is just under 900 square miles in area.

With all due respect for the deceased, I hasten to add that Anna Nicole Smith's total area was in constant flux, and therefore difficult to measure. But it seems to me that very little of it was unincorporated. I sincerely hope that rumours of statehood for Kevin Federline are merely that.

Hang on a sec: I realized last night that Virginia was the right answer for the remaining exclave! Isn't it? There's that sizable bit hanging off the end of maryland.

The eastern shore of Virginia, as its known, is not an exclave in the national sense -- it's true that (like Michigan's U.P.) it has no land connection to the rest of the body of the state, it's only an "exclave" in the state-level sense; you can get there via Maryland.

In a way, this whole topic produces moderately lame quiz questions; the Vermont exclave can be reached via a bridge, for example, from the U.S. side, and you can get to the Washington exclave (and to the "Northwest Angle" I think) without leaving waters under the territorial control of the U.S. Alaska is a really good example of an exclave. If you exclude "exclaves" that are connected to the parent nation via territorial waters, there really aren't very many. Kaliningrad Oblast is a good example, and there are a number in Asia (Azerbaijan has one, for example, as does Oman).

My father was born in January of 1940 to Lithuanian parents who went to a good German hospital in Königsberg for the birth. [His birth certificate, since lost, indicated Hitler as Chancellor.] Visiting Lithuania a few years ago, he was unable to visit the place of his birth because it's now called Kaliningrad and is stuck, non-contiguously, in Russia. Damn politics.

Now that we've covered exclaves, maybe next we'll do autoclaves.