Short Statement; Beastly Large Charge

You guys are just animals!

What zoo is that? I’m there!

When it came back around for the final look I had forgotten the Mx and had the pleasure of finding it again. It is not easy trying to spell animal names with state abbreviations. I all most ended up in a CO MA and I was afraid I'd take FL AK if I did not LA ND the answer.

I need a compass. Lodi had me driving around New Jersey looking for oddly named animals. Thanks, you two.

Very funny. Thank you!

I hope that's three animals and not one genetically engineered beast!

Not sure what the title suggests - beastly large charge?

I dug a few Wells that turned out to be dry holes. In my MidCoast provincialism, I didn't think of anything South of Portland (do they call it SoPo?). Great fun though. Thanks to both constructors.

As a North Jersey girl, Lodi, CA was not my first guess. :)

Ironically, the WY town was the first thing I thought of when I put CASPER in (probably because I live about 3 hours SE of it). But by the time I'd filled in the rest of the grid I'd forgotten that. Wasn't til I came back tonight that LINCOLN jumped out. Needed google for WELLS (and to confirm FREMONT) but otherwise it fell quickly after that. Though I admit that I parsed it as "NEW YAK CAME" (short statement) and "LAND ORCA" (beastly large charge). Not that I have any idea what a LAND ORCA is, but I'm sure an AI image generator would turn up something good.

Well conceived and constructed. Fun! Thanks. ;)

This was really fun to solve, thanks!

Kept trying to search “wells” on google maps and all it would give me was the locations of the gazillion Wells Fargo locations here in Charlotte. Finally googled city of Wells and got TX and MN ones (and of course the important one in UK). Since I had ALL the other letters making sense, I figured out there must be another one (OH, and is it maybe in New England, per the clue? Duh.). This was fun! Before I noticed all the towns, I was looking for 3-word clues, since the title was so notably 3-words (and a strange combo at that). One of those was “Green shampoo brand” which just seemed itching to be part of a meta (does anyone under 60 even remember Prell? Do they still make it?). Thanks for the fun!

That was terrific! I tried to make it much harder, then looked again and saw the cities. Lots of fun.

Good one. I needed the two un-numbered nudges, but I got the solve without opening the numbered ones!

20-ish years ago I was taking a motorcycle ride from Chicago through central IL and got caught in a terrible storm… had to pull over and wait under an old-style abandoned brick gas station canopy. I also had one of the first affordable handlebar GPSs (tiny black and white screen, no directions or anything like that) and it told me the abandoned gas station was in… Lodi, IL.

I had the metanism from the beginning, but there are too many duplicate city names among states, which made this so hard for me. Wells was the toughest. Fremont was the next toughest.

Finally, everything fell into place.

Finally solved! Got confused by one of the nudges, oh let’s be honest, by the whole thing!! Was looking for all the state abbreviations in the grid. If it weren’t for a friendly nudge from Claudia I’d still be circling them now! (And yes, wondered what on earth (or land) a Land Orca might be - certainly worthy of a big announcement!

Got it with nudges! Clever mechanism! Well done!