Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Closest Border Monuments — Found!

    I wrote recently about the many thousands of tiny segments that form the boundary between Canada and the United States. Fittingly, I called the article Canada-USA Border Segment Extremes. I’d been following up on a query from loyal reader “Greg”. Back then he asked if I knew where he could find the shortest of those…

  • Layers of Borderlocking

    Is Borderlock (-ed) (-ing) even a word? I don’t think so. “Landlocked” is a perfectly fine word but it doesn’t quite cover the situation I’m attempting to describe. I noticed a query that arrived recently on Twelve Mile Circle from a user of a well-known search engine. It piqued my curiosity. I’ve started many an…

  • Carolinian Canada

    Carolinian Canada? I know the Carolinas (North and South) and I’ve visited parts of Canada, but I’d never seen the two combined before into a single thought. I’d spied that unfamiliar phrase during my exhaustive search for the world’s best place to observe a sunrise and a sunset over water. Naturally it triggered my curiosity.…

  • The Spots Not Covered

    I’ve confessed before to my fondness for an old-fashioned newspaper on a Sunday morning, and it’s doubly so when I stumble across an informative map in those ink-stained pages. A map I spied among the folds demanded my full attention, the grandiose centerpiece of a full page advertisement for a mobile phone company. They touted…

  • Sunrise and Sunset over Water

    I posted an article on east coast sunsets over water nearly a lifetime ago in Internet time, way back in November 2008. I described peculiar instances where observers could experience sunsets totally over water on the eastern coast of the United States. Think about it. People on the eastern side of any landmass don’t have…

  • Keeping It North

    I’d like to focus my attention firmly north a little longer to complete the circle, specifically, the Arctic Circle as it passes through Iceland. The previous articles, in case you haven’t had a chance to review them, involved Deadhorse, Alaska and the FINORU tripoint. The Arctic Circle runs through very few countries, only eight of…

  • Also Very Northerly

    Let’s get back to the second part of the geography puzzle originally posed by loyal reader Matthias. We will continue to explore the current northernmost reaches of Google Street View. It’s still Deadhorse, Alaska at the very moment I draft this article. However, that will change as Google’s adventurous drivers reach new extremes. The European…

  • Clustr-ed

    You might notice something a little different on the page template of Twelve Mile Circle today. I’ve decided to add a ClustrMap after more soul-searching and internal debate that you might image. You may be wondering why this was a difficult choice. After all, what would be more appropriate for a geo-oddities blog than a…

  • Streetview Beats a Deadhorse

    It all started innocently enough as a challenge from loyal reader “Matthias.” He began to ponder various geo-oddities surrounding the northernmost reach of Google Street View. Of course, I was up for a mental adventure after having been trapped in my home for several days due to snow.(1) However, unbeknownst to Matthias, Google Street View…

  • Let’s Get County Lines Drawn on Google Street View

    [UPDATE: Google Maps finally added county lines in January 2012]. Loyal reader “Greg” wonders, “why Google [Maps] doesn’t show county boundaries?” Google Maps and its ongoing lack of county borders is a continuing frustration to me, but I suspect it doesn’t exist for the same reason as the not-quite-perfect international borders: except for a few…

Latest Comments

  1. That was its original range before people spread it all around. Now it’s in lots of different places, including Oklahoma.

  2. I think that range needs to be expanded greatly. I’m in the Oklahoma City area and those are fairly prevalent…

  3. The law in the 1800s when most of the countries was being broke down into smaller one stated that you…

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