Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Canada

  • That’s Siouan for Water

    I noticed an interesting geographic prefix as I explored Minnedosa, Manitoba in Triple Letter – Canada. The same prefix also applied to one of the individual United States, specifically Minnesota. In both cases the “Minne” portion derived from a Siouan word for water. Minnedosa was Flowing Water and Minnesota was Cloudy Water. I wondered if…

  • Live Long and Prosper (burp)

    Twelve Mile Circle is all about geo-oddities although the author of the site has other interests too. Sometimes those topics collide. I’ve made no bones about my interest in craft beer and it creeps into 12MC from time to time. Today is one of those times. I noticed a passing reference to Vulcan Beer in…

  • Ferry Hopping

    I’m completely humbled by the response to the recent “How Many Islands in the USA Require Ferry Travel” article. I found 64 islands matching the criteria and stood back smugly until user-after-user uncovered additional instances that I’d overlooked. The number of islands currently stands at 77. It wouldn’t surprise me if it continued to grow.…

  • Triple Letter – Canada

    Recently I posted an article that described all of the places in the United States where the county seat, the county, and the state all began with the same letter. I considered seven instances where each of the three levels of government had completely different names to be particularly “outstanding.” For example, one was Gibson,…

  • (Mostly) Fictional Ferries

    I receive an inordinate amount of visitor traffic on my Ferry Maps of the World site. Very few of those hits come from 12MC readers. It’s basically a lot of one-and-done landings from people who never return to the website ever again. Google decided it didn’t like me about a year ago or I was…

  • Oldest Continuous Businesses

    I enjoyed Wikipedia’s List of Oldest Companies when I bounced onto it randomly, and of course it included a geographic component. Using the list, I examined claims from various parts of the world. However, let’s consider that these represent claims. References and websites for individual companies often hedge their bets. They used qualifiers such as…

  • Latitudinal Border Station Extremes

    So I’m not sure the title adequately conveyed what I’m trying to describe. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better concise title to replace it either. Conceptually, I wanted to know the northernmost and southernmost places in the world and in the United States where one could cross an international border by automobile via a…

  • Pennsylvanians are From Mars, Texans are From Venus

    I keep a close eye on the geographic characteristics of Twelve Mile Circle visitors, which seems natural for a geo-oddity website. I also generate article topics from viewer anomalies. For example, I never knew about Mars in Pennsylvania (map) until a Martian visitor, one from a spot north of Pittsburgh as it turned out, jumped…

  • Most Remote Chinese Restaurants in North America

    I wonder if I’ve observed a genuine phenomenon or if I’m falling into a confirmation bias trap. Everywhere I travel, and I meander through extremely rural areas as a matter of preference, I notice Chinese restaurants. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this peculiarity. I posted Not Fusion, CONfusion a couple of years ago.…

  • Canadian Ethnic Enclave

    The intersection of my various hobbies provides a nice tangential benefit for Twelve Mile Circle. It offers a steady stream of curiosities and article ideas. I like to look through census records and use Street View to see if I can spy on the former homes of ancestors and distant relatives. Many of the census…