Category: Canada

  • Impressive Pedestrian Bridges

    Plans change. I gamble when I choose to mull over a thought and allow it to percolate in my mind. Sometimes the delay results in a better article. Other times, events overtake ideas not completely formed yet. Loyal reader “Rhodent” and I were communicating by email about a potential offshoot of “NOT as the Crow…

  • Pick a Lane. Any Lane

    Roads. I’ve been thinking about roads a lot lately. I’m not sure how that morphed into a search for the road with the most lanes, but that’s where it ended this evening. San Diego, California, USA Lots of other people have wondered the same thing. That allowed me to cherry-pick various lists and collections for…

  • Extreme Reservations

    It started out as it often does through a chance encounter with a roadmap anomaly. I happened to be examining a stretch of highway online. Then I spied an uncharacteristically wide split between the westbound and eastbound lanes of Interstate 84 directly outside of Pendleton, Oregon. It seemed quite remarkable. A mountain ridge forced opposing…

  • Strange Canadian Bedfellows

    So I posted an article a few months ago called Strange Bedfellows. It explored country size comparisons included within the CIA World Factbook (e.g., “Botswana is about the size of Texas”). It was a great resource, I noted, for readers from the United States because landmasses were compared to US-based equivalents. Because the Central Intelligence…

  • Humble Mississippi

    Most everyone has an awareness of the Mississippi River no matter their cultural background or geographic familiarity. It would be like never hearing about the Amazon or the Nile. The Mississippi is one of the great rivers of the world and it drains a huge North American watershed. It’s a fixture. I’ve enjoyed this natural…

  • Canada to Mexico

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: Google Maps changes its algorithms periodically. Times and distances were correct when published in 2012; they have changed in the meantime] The Twelve Mile Circle continues to generate all sorts of interesting search engine queries, an endless stream of potential article topics. I remember back in the early days of the blog I…

  • Big Zero

    I noticed something I hadn’t seen before as I gazed upon a map of the Canada – United States border. Well, maybe I’d noticed it before although it must not have registered at the time if that’s the case. What? You don’t stare at maps of the border? It’s one of my fixations. I’ve learned…

  • Abandoned Canals in Canada

    Generally I know exactly how I come up with each topic I hand-pick for Twelve Mile Circle articles. That’s not the case here. I don’t recall the exact sequence of steps that led to abandoned canals in Canada. Well, I understand the Canadian part. I figured it would be a smaller universe. Also it’s been…

  • Captains Less Prestigious

    I had no trouble finding populated places named for Captain James Cook, the legendary 18th Century explorer and navigator, along the edges of the waters he sailed. However, plenty of other captains sailed the oceans during that same period. Naturally I wondered if the maps memorialized others similarly. Could I find other places named “Captain…

  • Latitude Longitude Sequences

    I was looking for geo-oddities — so many of my articles start off that same way — when I spotted something unusual. This was just prior to my recent trip to Washington and Oregon while I was working on my travel agenda. I’d been contemplating the addition of a quick loop to Newport on the…