Category: U.S. States

  • 2016 Travel Plans

    A new year dawned on Twelve Mile Circle as I turned my eye towards another batch of travel adventures. Plans began to fall into place. They won’t approach the stratospheric heights of a very ambitious 2015 travel season although they’ll still be substantive from my perspective. As always, I like to post my general plans…

  • Interstate Highway Counties

    I requested an additional account on the Mob Rule county counting website recently. I’d been planning a couple of trips for 2016. This including one focused primarily on adding new counties to my lifetime tally in an obscure geographic corner of Appalachia. So I’d been using this spare account to calculate “what-if” scenarios. Naturally, I…

  • Iowa, Iowa, Iowa

    So let’s continuing on the theme of items uncovered while researching Geographic Matryoshka with US States. I’ll also recognize the upcoming Presidential primaries in Iowa in a couple of weeks. Maybe an Iowa topic might be appropriate. I’d uncovered a wonderful triple sequence formed by Iowa Township in Iowa County in the state of Iowa.…

  • Geographic Matryoshka with US States

    A challenge resulted from the recent Outside of California article, in a comment by loyal reader Rhodent. However, I have to say that I spent way more time than I’d care to admit seeking an optimal solution. Readers who relish a good mental challenge will probably enjoy trying to improve upon my results. Others will…

  • Outside of California

    I spotted a town in Maryland called California. I’d known about it for awhile. It always seemed odd to have a town in one state named for another, especially one located an entire continent away. So I figured there must be a connection somewhere in there. Maybe it had roots in the California Gold Rush…

  • Arizona’s Wandering Capital

    The article I discovered was more than a year old, although it was new to me when I spotted it. The title intrigued me, Did You Know: Capital Of Arizona Moved 4 Times Before Settling In Phoenix. No, actually I didn’t know that. I’ve featured similar stories of wandering capitals for other states such as…

  • Alaska’s Southernmost Mainland Airport

    Thank goodness for random search queries that land on Twelve Mile Circle. This time our unknown visitor wanted to find Alaska’s southernmost mainland airport. I don’t know why they wanted to learn that and it didn’t really matter. It became an intellectual exercise, and considerably more complicated than I expected. I’m not completely confident in…

  • Lowest Landlocked Elevation – US States

    The analysis of landlocked national lowpoints amused me so much that I decided to extend the exercise. So I switched to individual states within the United States. Once again I found a perfectly matching Wikipedia page so I didn’t have to recreate my own. Behold: a List of U.S. states and territories by elevation. Only…

  • Florida Highlands?

    I’ve been to Florida many times and always considered it to be incredibly flat. It’s one of the flattest of all states with a mean elevation of only 100 feet (30 metres). Only Delaware edges it out. It definitely represents the smallest elevation span within its borders, extending from sea level to only 345 ft…

  • State Nickname Streets

    I focused an inordinate amount of time and attention on Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames as I wrote the Comparison Nicknames article. That wasn’t the original intent of the effort however, just an interesting byproduct that spun into its own topic. I’d been working on something else, something finally revealed today. It all began…