Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Canada

  • Runaway Truck!

    I went on a brief roadtrip last Autumn, an experience I described in more detail in my Adventures along Maryland I-70/68. In that article I mentioned a massive road cut at Sideling Hill. However, I couldn’t find a reason to highlight another feature, a runaway truck ramp just west of the cut as one descends…

  • Radioactive

    I follow the various geo-blogs on an RSS reader like many of you do. Google’s LatLong Blog announced an imagery update on January 9 as it does periodically. So I checked the list of improvements as is my normal custom. One of the towns updated with high resolution aerial imagery sparked my curiosity: Radium Springs,…

  • The Pinetree Line

    I’m not sure how I stumbled upon the Pinetree Line. It seemed to be a particularly descriptive term though. So I guess I tucked it away on my list of “things to ponder later.” It was a Cold War manifestation, an effort by Canada and the United States to provide an early warning system should…

  • Airport Ferries

    I’ve mentioned my strangely popular ferry pages before. They receive lots of search engine referrals in a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg manner: did the site’s success create higher rankings on search engine algorithms or did search engines create the site’s popularity, or a bit of both in a ratcheting cycle? I dunno (frankly not going…

  • Ticklish Canada

    Tedious would be the right way to describe my efforts to clean dead links from my ferry website over the holidays. Even that nasty task provided a nice side benefit. It offered an opportunity to view detailed portions of maps I’d not considered in awhile. That’s how I spotted Black Tickle as I repaired the…

  • County Counting in Canada

    I noticed yesterday evening that the Mob Rule County Counting website added Canadian provinces as of December 29, 2011. That means that all loyal 12MC readers from Canada, or those from South of the Border who have traveled extensively in Canada, can now expand their county counting fun considerably. I’ve already added my pathetic results,…

  • Numerical Place Names

    I wondered if I could find any place names composed entirely of numbers. Thus, while communities such as Thousand Oaks and Twentynine Palms in California were interesting in a sense, they wouldn’t do for my purpose. I wanted to find places that transcended the precision of a description to reach entirely higher circles of absurdity.…

  • Odds and Ends 4

    The mailbag runneth over with great finds and suggestions from the generous readers of the Twelve Mile Circle audience. I’ll combine that with a couple of my recent discoveries and voilà, instant article. I’m not sure if I’m feeling lazy or if I’m still in a food coma from the recent Thanksgiving holiday but either…

  • Sundog

    I mentioned Goldfield, Nevada recently. There I noticed a street called Sundog Avenue that looked like the kind of place where one could experience a sundog in person. Then I tucked the thought away for a few days until I had more time to explore it. A sundog describes a specific atmospheric condition that allows…

  • Better Sister Cities

    Sister Cities International’s mission promotes “peace through mutual respect, understanding, & cooperation — one individual, one community at a time.” I find that laudable although I wonder how they establish these relationships. Does it involve some sort of affinity perspective or does someone simply say, “hey, wanna be our sister city?” My hometown — Arlington,…