Category: Cities/Towns
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Ribeira Grande
São Miguel, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) Ribeira Grande, translates to “Large Stream” in English. It serves as the main town on São Miguel’s northern coast (map). A large stream runs through town as the name implies. It provided power for grain mills in the early days of settlement, and a town flourished along…
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Great Falls Park
On the Virginia Side of the Potomac River (2008) Sitting along the wide, placid shoreline of the Potomac River in Washington, DC, it’s hard to imagine raging rapids crashing through a narrow gorge just 15 miles upstream. Here stand the mighty Great Falls, rushing from those first foothills of the Appalachian Mountains further west (map).…
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Inner Banks, Day 2
We spent the first day getting down to our base at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. That set us up well for Day Two. Now we could focus squarely on capturing some unvisited counties. I decided to travel counter-clockwise (or anti-clockwise for the international 12MC audience). This map shows the actual coordinates I used to guide…
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Inner Banks, Day 1
I set my sights on a doughnut hole of unvisited counties in northeastern North Carolina. I’d left them untouched until now. No interstate highways passed through them. The didn’t fall on a direct path coming home from the beach. They simply sat there as empty white space on my County Counting map. Seven of them,…
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Canal Park
Duluth, Minnesota (August 2007) Our journey through the upper Midwest brought us as far north as Duluth. Here a city rises along the westernmost deep-water port with access to the Atlantic Ocean. This is all the more surprising because it’s a good third of the way across the continent. Even so, ships — massively large…
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Cape Byron Lighthouse
Byron Bay NSW, Australia (October 1997) Cape Byron is the eastern most point on the continent, where “Australia greets the day.” Strange geographic trivia has always fascinated me, so I dragged my wife as far along the cape as possible. We were running short on time so we missed our goal by a few hundred…
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Fort Moultrie
Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina (September 2008) Sullivan’s Island brackets the northern entrance to Charleston Harbor. It seemed natural that a defensive fort should rise along the southwestern flank of the island to protect a vital port city further upstream. From this strategic spot, any ship entering the main shipping channel would pass less than a…
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Fort Knox State Historic Site
Prospect, Maine (August 2009) Before I describe Fort Knox, perhaps I should clear-up something. This place shouldn’t be confused with the “famous” Fort Knox you’ve probably heard of before. You won’t find any gold here although it shares a name with the fort in Kentucky that houses the United States Bullion Depository. No, this Fort…
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Vinalhaven Ferry
A Journey Across Maine’s Penobscot Bay (August 2009) Ferries operated by the Maine Department of Transportation provide service from Rockland (map) on the mainland to Vinalhaven Island (map), twelve miles out to sea in Penobscot Bay. Start the journey by reviewing this video and then discover greater details below. Some History A pedestrian ride on…
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Tangier Island Ferry
Reedville to Tangier, Virginia (June 2000) We drove down the spine of Virginia’s scenic Northern Neck, a broad appendage of land between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers that becomes increasingly isolated as easterly-flowing waters widen on their way to Chesapeake Bay. We traveled along Route 3, then onto Route 360 until we ran out of…