Category: Borders
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Four Corners, Part 6 (Reflections)
I decided to have a little fun in the final article of the Four Corners series. A couple of my earlier posts mentioned a trip through the same general area many years ago. It served as a short leg of my longest road trip ever, eventually covering 8,000 miles (12,900 kilometres) in 28 days during…
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Four Corners, Part 5 (Breweries)
Every longtime reader in the Twelve Mile Circle audience already knew that this article was going to happen. Here comes the one about my latest brewery adventure. As always, I’ll try to put a bit of a geo-geek spin on it. I won’t talk about any actual beers because that wouldn’t meet the stated purpose…
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Tendril of Fairmont
Last October I took a trip through various parts of northern West Virginia to count some counties. This included a stopover in Morgantown, home of the state’s flagship West Virginia University. I bypassed this area a number of times previously so I enjoyed being able to stop there for once. Research at the time brought…
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The Border Peaks
It’s not unusual to see an international border extend across or along a mountain range. Even Mt. Everest sits on the border between Nepal and China. Also, a border will need to be adjusted sometimes when the underlying physical characteristics of a mountain changes too. That issue confronted Italy and Switzerland several years ago as…
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Duck
Several years ago, and I don’t recall exactly when, I wrote an entire Twelve Mile Circle article without using a single Google tool. I found it incredibly frustrating, nearly impossible. The article got buried somewhere in the archive and I don’t remember the title. Just trust me. I didn’t enjoy it. Apparently I didn’t learn…
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Heartland, Part 4 (Beyond Covered)
I couldn’t seem to shake my ever-growing fascination with bridges during my recent Heartland excursion. It started a few years ago, specifically with covered bridges, and expanded to various other styles for some unknown reason. I wouldn’t put this particular fascination at the same level as my county counting or my brewery obsessions although it…
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Heartland, Part 1 (Why, oh Why?)
Here we go again! I just finished a drive through the Midwest, all the way to Iowa and back, and returned on Saturday. We didn’t stay anywhere for very long and kept moving most of the time. We also stayed in different hotels for seven of the eight nights, and covered about 2,200 miles (3,500…
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Major Basilicas
The Basilica of Sacré-Cœur sat high atop Montmartre, as noted recently in Select City Highpoints, becoming a memorable landmark on the Parisian skyline. Setting that aside, I wondered what made a church a basilica. In the course of investigating that I learned that a basilica falls into one of several levels of significance within the…
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Gibraltaresque
I didn’t intend to feature Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. I talked about that one before. For example, a major road crossed its airport runway. Fun stuff! One other little tidbit interested me too, its etymology. Gibraltar came from the name of an Arab or Berber military…
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More Lago de Maracaibo
More oddities began to appear as I explored the borders of Venezuela’s Lago de Maracaibo a bit further. Then I noticed that advertisements embedded entirely within unrelated websites began to display in Spanish as I visited them. Google didn’t know what to make of me with all of my disjointed Twelve Mile Circle searching. Its…