Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Distance

  • Presidential Distances

    Twelve Mile Circle talked about birthplaces and death locations of the Presidents of the United States. Now let’s finish this off with a comparison of distances between those two points. This involved a rather simple process of dropping the lat/long coordinates for each president into a great circle distance calculator and recording the results. Then…

  • Lockport

    The website hit came from Lockport, Illinois. Well, Lockport sounded familiar, although from a different time and place than Illinois. It also seemed quite descriptive, a lock on a canal combined with a port (or perhaps a portage). Locks would be ideal places for settlements during the heyday of canal travel a century or more…

  • Turning the Tables

    Regular 12MC readers learned long ago that I salivate over the geography of website visitors as reported by Google Analytics, the more unusual the better. I activated that feature during the earliest days of Twelve Mile Circle and I’ve created quite a compendium of traffic logs since then. Savvy readers have toyed with my daily…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 1 (The River)

    12MC is back! Thank you for bearing with me while I took a brief respite from posting new articles. There were logistical reasons. Each race in the five state series took much of the morning, then we’d have to drive to the next location (stopping at geo-oddity sites along the way), arrive late each afternoon,…

  • Named for Schoolcraft

    I’ve been following Every County lately while the author winds his way virtually through, well, every county. He was at the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula at the time of publication. Slowly he’s blogging his was down from the Straits of Mackinac. The name Schoolcraft(¹) kept recurring as I read through new installments, a…

  • Farthest Inland Port

    I’ve discussed the port at Duluth, Minnesota (map) before and even created a travel page for it. I was particularly fascinated with the bit of trivia that Duluth was a significant seaport even though it was located 2,342 miles (3,770 kilometres) from its eventual outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. The Duluth Seaway Port Authority described…

  • Three American Moscows

    I noticed an interesting aside on a Wikipedia entry for Moscow, Idaho while I examined background information about the University of Idaho for the recent What State U article: “It was reported by early settlers that five men in the area met to choose a proper name for the town, but could not come to…

  • What State U

    I mentioned the University of Idaho in a tangential comment on Résumé Bait and Switch. I focused on its location in Moscow, the city in Idaho not the one in Russia. However, I noticed an additional feature I didn’t discuss at the time. The western edge of the university ran amazingly close to the state…

  • Confluence of Confluences

    I began to consider confluences while pondering the Confluence Brewing Company during my recent Geo-BREWities exercise. Maybe I should credit Google Map’s auto-completion function for the suggestion after I typed the brewery name into an address bar. It noted that at least one town of Confluence existed. A quick check of the Geographic Names Information…

  • Three Letter Oddities

    I mentioned OGG as the three-letter airport code for Kahului Airport on the Hawaiian island of Maui in the Middling article for no greater significance than I found it amusing. And it sounded like something a caveman might say. A little Intertubes sleuthing led me to an easy explanation at Airport ABCs, an article reprinted…