Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Baarle-Hertog Quadripoint Boundary Cross

    I love getting comments from readers. Recently I received an email about a quote from my recent Jungholz Quadripoint Boundary Cross posting. As a reminder, a quadripoint occurs when four borders meet at a single point, and example being the “Four Corners” of the United States where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado join together.…

  • Geography of Link Farms that Target Me

    I personally moderate every comment on Twelve Mile Circle. If you make an effort to respond to one of my posts with something thoughtful, rest assured I’ve genuinely read it. A few months ago I had a growing problem with spammers. Thankfully I found a solution that keeps that junk away from my pages automatically.…

  • Jungholz Quadripoint Boundary Cross

    The Austrian town of Jungholz presents an unusual geographic placement. Only a single point connects it to the rest of Austria. Otherwise Germany completely surrounds it. Jungholz is an Austrian exclave for all practical purposes. In the strictest technical sense, a single dot attaches it to larger Austria. However, the only convenient path to the…

  • Foreclosed

    A young couple with children purchased a home in February 2006. Today the house sits gutted; bought out by a speculator who will probably flip it when the spring market opens in a few months. I never met the family. They lived around the corner and we exchange waves as I strolled by on my…

  • Our Lady of the Gas Pump

    I was wandering through some old haunts recently. Then I spotted a building I used to see quite often. I’d forgotten all about this place, but was happy to find an unusual friend once again. An Architectural Landmark Observe the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church. This unusual structure sits in the Rosslyn section of Arlington…

  • Google Sightseeing

    It pleased me to learn today that a recent post from Twelve Mile Circle appeared on Google Sightseeing. I’d nominated the Bruny Island Ferry images I found on Google Street View (including one from inside the ferry). They first appeared on my Ferries of Australia post. Then Google Sightseeing used it as part of their…

  • Visualizing Early Washington

    A great article appeared in the Washington Post Magazine over the weekend. For now it remains available on-line on their website. “The Beginning of the Road – High-tech computer wizardry and good old-fashioned historical sleuthing are re-creating the lost world of Washington’s origins.” The Vision The underlying effort examined historical maps, drawings and narratives. It…

  • Icelandic Road Sign Map

    Iceland is a country of barely 300,000 people with two-thirds of them living in the greater Reykjavík area. That makes for wide open spaces interspersed with small, scattered settlements across the remainder of this island nation. It also results in some of the most amazingly detailed road signs imaginable. I took this photograph on a…

  • Lowest Public Restroom in North America

    As I noted recently, the highest and lowest elevations in the continental United States are only about 80 miles apart. What I didn’t say at the time was that I came across an interesting image as I researched that fact. A Restroom! Yes, a restroom sits here at the Badwater Basin in Death Valley. That…

  • Highest and Lowest, Oh So Close

    California contains both the highest and lowest elevations of the continental United States. Well, the “Lower 48” more precisely. Astoundingly, they are less than 88 miles (142 kilometers) apart with an elevation change approaching 15,000 feet. Mount Whitney is the California Highpoint at 14,494 feet (4,418 meters) above sea level. It crowns the mighty Sierra…

Latest Comments

  4. Osage Orange trees are fairly common in Northern Delaware. I assumed they were native plants. As kids we definitely called…

  5. Enough of them in Northern Delaware that they don’t stand out at all until the fruit drops in the fall.…