Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Borders

  • New York Steals Roads from its Neighbors!

    I learned some interesting facts from our prior exercise, specifically that there are several extremely short U.S. Interstate highway segments that just barely clip the corners of various states. In the course of that journey I also uncovered a startling revelation. New York is stealing roads from its neighbors. I’d write it off as an…

  • It Enters then Exits

    I noticed an interesting anomaly as I returned from my recent trip down south. Naturally I considered a variety of paths before settling on my ultimate course. I nearly selected one of the other finalists but I turned it down at the last minute in favor of some back-roads through rolling countryside. Had I followed…

  • A Single Point on the Border

    I encountered a number of interesting situations as I pulled together my recent series of borderlocking articles. One of those revelations pertained to Jeff Davis County(1) in the State of Texas. Examine its layout closely. Clearly it borders on Mexico. However that happens only at a single point along the Rio Grande River at its…

  • Bordersplit

    I have to keep coming up with new words to describe my various geo-oddity fascinations. Today I coined “bordersplit.” It refers to an object cleaved by a boundary line. The way I figure it, if we can use landlocked legitimately then bordersplit should be treated the same way even if it doesn’t exist in a…

  • Seventeen Steps from Middle

    I left some unfinished business behind a few weeks ago with the Layers of Borderlocking article and it has continued to gnaw at me. As you may recall, I figured that someone standing within the boundaries of the United States would never have to travel through more than seventeen counties (eighteen if one counts the…

  • Revisiting Previous Articles with Street View – UK

    I’m still having a great time with the recent major release of Google Street View images for the United Kingdom. It’s like somebody opened a new playground with so many different places for me to travel vicariously. It also offered an opportunity to go back to some of my earlier articles and see if I…

  • Closest Border Monuments — Found!

    I wrote recently about the many thousands of tiny segments that form the boundary between Canada and the United States. Fittingly, I called the article Canada-USA Border Segment Extremes. I’d been following up on a query from loyal reader “Greg”. Back then he asked if I knew where he could find the shortest of those…

  • Layers of Borderlocking

    Is Borderlock (-ed) (-ing) even a word? I don’t think so. “Landlocked” is a perfectly fine word but it doesn’t quite cover the situation I’m attempting to describe. I noticed a query that arrived recently on Twelve Mile Circle from a user of a well-known search engine. It piqued my curiosity. I’ve started many an…

  • Carolinian Canada

    Carolinian Canada? I know the Carolinas (North and South) and I’ve visited parts of Canada, but I’d never seen the two combined before into a single thought. I’d spied that unfamiliar phrase during my exhaustive search for the world’s best place to observe a sunrise and a sunset over water. Naturally it triggered my curiosity.…

  • Also Very Northerly

    Let’s get back to the second part of the geography puzzle originally posed by loyal reader Matthias. We will continue to explore the current northernmost reaches of Google Street View. It’s still Deadhorse, Alaska at the very moment I draft this article. However, that will change as Google’s adventurous drivers reach new extremes. The European…