Category: Distance
-
Plank Roads
I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…
-
Overwhelming Union
I thought Disunion Averted would be straightforward. Union City, Indiana was on one side of a state boundary and Union City, Ohio was on the other. Fortunately I could search on the Indiana location because the town in Ohio kept generating false positives. Search engines wanted to point me towards the City of Union instead.…
-
Make a Bee Line
I noticed an historical record that mentioned a late 19th Century railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis Railway. That’s not what interested me though, it was the railroad’s nickname, the “Bee Line” What a wonderful name for a railway. I considered it a nice play on words aligning with the idiom “to make a…
-
Kentucky Adventure, Part 2 (Blazing a Trail)
Every schoolchild in the United States learned about the Cumberland Gap during history class. The Appalachian Mountains formed a natural barrier to western expansion during the colonial era. Even so, the lower section contained a convenient gap. Native Americans knew about it for centuries before Europeans ever arrived. Dr. Thomas Walker, a Virginia physician and…
-
Kentucky Adventure, Part 1 (Getting There)
Every great adventure had to start with a first step. I planned to explore southeastern Kentucky and now I had to get there. Part of the appeal, frankly, was not having to deal with an airline or an airport. I could drive to Kentucky. Theoretically. And so the long drive began I’d always understood intellectually…
-
Border Hopping on the Welsh Marches Line
I found some border weirdness between Pontrilas in Herefordshire, England and Pandy in Monmouthshire, Wales. All would be fine in an automobile. Drive between the towns on A465, cross an unremarkable bridge over the border and continue on one’s way for an eight-minute journey (map). No big deal. Take the same trip by train however…
-
DC Brewery Trail
EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2013. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME. How does one justify a series of brewery visits within the subject matter of a geo-oddities blog? Good question. Author’s prerogative? Precedence? Ultimately I considered it a road trip; a very short and very specialized…
-
Shortline
That’s shortline (with a “t”) not shoreline. The term describes very small railroads. I first became aware of shortlines a couple of years ago when we took a brief trip to Vermont during early Autumn. One of our activities included an excursion along the western bank of the Connecticut River. We took that trip on…
-
Hundred Dollar Hamburger
Sometimes I wonder if I’m the last person to find out about things. A reader who identified himself as “Jasper” mentioned a $100 hamburger when I put out a call for southeastern Kentucky travel suggestions. I thought he was referring literally to a hundred dollar hamburger. Such a thing does indeed exist so I didn’t…
-
(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…