Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Vennbahn

    Google Street View finally arrived in Belgium. This offered an opportunity to revisit a topic that’s been sitting in my queue unaddressed for the longest time. I figured that most of us were familiar with the Belgian portion of the Vennbahn railroad line. This is the line that created several small German enclaves within Belgium…

  • Google Maps County Lines Imminent?

    At long last, I think we are getting very close to seeing county lines on Google Maps. I noticed them earlier today but they’ve since disappeared. I also observed numerous town boundaries, and in a couple of instances, even neighborhood boundaries. I believe the folks at Google are experimenting with various displays: some of what…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 2

    I went through a bit of an exercise to uncover the extreme eastern and western longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48 United States, in Part 1. These points looked rather striking when I placed them in a map. Now, let’s look a little closer at the eight points individually. I consider…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 1

    I’ve noted my appreciation for random visitors on many occasions. They serve as an amazing source of accidental topics. This time an anonymous lurker wished to find the easternmost extreme of the U.S. Central Time Zone. Why stop there, I figured? What are the extreme longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48…

  • Disestablished National Parks

    Last summer 12MC reader “Scott” provided me with a boatload of National Park trivia. I continue to mine that for article suggestions. With that, I’m going pursue an angle that might be little known, or maybe just to me. One often thinks of everything associated with National Parks as perpetual. After all, their goals include…

  • Easiest Five

    The Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona intersect at a quadripoint, is the quickest way to visit four of the United States. The distance between the states, by definition, equals zero. I’ve experienced that myself a couple of times: I was asked a question quite awhile ago but only checked into an…

  • Jamestown Field Trip

    I had the pleasure of serving as a parent chaperone for my son’s school field trip to Jamestown last week. Admittedly, the thought of accompanying two busloads of children aged nine-to-ten sounded a bit daunting. And of course it definitely had its challenges at times. I thought it was going to unfold like an uglier…

  • Peering Behind the Curtain

    I’ve used the Google Maps URL Shortener for a lot of links I’ve included within Twelve Mile Circle. Often these maps are “also rans” that are interesting but not quite enough to embed directly within the page. They fall within the g.co/maps domain and directory. That’s a little different than the general Google URL Shortener…

  • Most Landlocked State

    The query simply said, “Most Landlocked State.” It seemed innocent enough as I pondered it. I believed it would have a simple solution. However, the more I considered it the more I figured the answer could vary based upon one’s definition of landlocked. I wish I could ask the anonymous searcher what he (or she)…

  • Odds and Ends 4

    The mailbag runneth over with great finds and suggestions from the generous readers of the Twelve Mile Circle audience. I’ll combine that with a couple of my recent discoveries and voilà, instant article. I’m not sure if I’m feeling lazy or if I’m still in a food coma from the recent Thanksgiving holiday but either…

Latest Comments

  2. Hi Mr. Howder — Just going from memory, I recall that your “rule” for counting a nation/state/county is “if I’m…

  5. Does anyone have actual music to the song – Tanaha ,Timpson. Bobo and Blair ?? It was recorded by Tex…