Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Government

  • Antietam Topography

    I crossed the Potomac River on my way back from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and drove into Sharpsburg, Maryland a few miles later, the site of the Battle of Antietam. I didn’t have a great deal of time for my visit but I was still able to stop at a few favorite spots within this well-known…

  • Smallest Internationally-Divided Landmass

    According to the CIA World Fact Book, the island of Saint Martin is the world’s smallest landmass shared by two independent states. A 15 kilometer border separates France’s Saint Martin from the Netherlands’ Sint Maarten, an autonomous area of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The entire landmass covers only 87 square kilometers, or about half…

  • The John McCain Flight

    DISCLAIMER: This is a geography and travel blog, not a political blog. No endorsement or disparagement is intended. Later today I get to take the John McCain flight. No, I don’t get to fly with John McCain. I’m talking about the regularly-scheduled flight that is a small part of his political legacy. An Airport on…

  • John Hardeman Walker’s Bootheel

    I sometimes wonder about unusually-shaped geopolitical boundaries. Sometimes I find it’s due to specific geographic features as with The Gambia. Other times it arises from territorial clashes as with the Temburong exclave of Brunei Darussalam. Generally speaking, the stranger the shape the better the story. So I got to wondering about the Missouri Bootheel. That’s…

  • Australia’s Weird Little Time Zone

    Continental Australia is divided into three standard time zones, Western, Central and Eastern. It’s pretty simple to understand even bearing in mind that Australian Central Standard Time aligns with the half-hour (UTC+9:30). Individual Australian states and territories determine whether to recognise Daylight Saving Time (DST) or not. Far-flung Australian island territories and its Antarctic stations…

  • In the 4th of July Spirit

    With the 4th of July holiday upon us, I thought it would be good to start this post with an image of Independence Hall (map). Here, the Founding Fathers created the Declaration of Independence so many years ago. That document had a profound and abundant impact on the foundation of the United States, a fact…

  • The Point of Beginning (Wisconsin)

    We drove towards a rather obscure spot during our travels around southern Wisconsin this week. I’ve had a fascination with artificial points of significance for some time. So naturally I wanted to add another one to my growing list of accomplishments. Some people like to climb mountains. I like to stand at places of no…

  • The Northwest Angle

    I can’t believe I haven’t discussed the Northwest Angle yet. It’s perhaps the most famous and renowned national border anomaly in North America. Way back when I started Twelve Mile Circle I featured Michigan’s Lost Peninsula and I’ve long had a fansite devoted to my visit to Point Roberts, Washington. However, the Northwest Angle fell…

  • Unusual Goes Very Local, Part II

    Continuing on the theme from the previous post, I have another example of a very local anomaly in Arlington County, Virginia. Hopefully you will enjoy this one too. I encourage you to check around your neighborhood and see if you can find your own strange situations. I’d be glad to feature any that you might…

  • Northernmost and Southernmost World Capitals

    Twelve Mile Circle likes to deal with the extremes in geography. So the current topic continues with that theme, the national capitals that are closest to the north and south poles. Northernmost The title for northernmost national capital goes to Reykjavík, Iceland, at 64 degrees north. That’s just a couple of degrees short of the…