Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: GPS

  • There’s a Juno in Texas but not in Alaska

    Did any Alaskan readers of Twelve Mile Circle watch the NBC Nightly News this evening? When did your state capital become Juno? I happened to be sort-of watching it in the background as I was working on an article I’ll post tomorrow. The story centered on a Next Generation air traffic control system using satellite…

  • Farm to Market

    I have food on my mind. It’s Thanksgiving morning here in the United States and food is a big part of that. I image we’ll have very few U.S. readers today. Most of them will be feasting on turkey, watching the American version of “football,” and getting mentally prepared to hit the shopping malls tomorrow…

  • Virtual Traffic Circle

    Traffic circles or roundabouts are a common design that circulates traffic safely and efficiently through intersections. They are a primary choice in many parts of the world. Nonetheless, they are much less common in the United States. Many American drivers tremble in fear when encountering one. That is the exact situation experienced this week by…

  • Coordinate Palindromes

    I noticed an odd query on the site earlier today. Someone was searching for “Coordinate Palindromes in Nebraska.” I know exactly how they arrived here because the search engine linked them to one of my previous articles featuring Place Name Palindromes. However, I had no familiarity with what could possibly be considered a coordinate palindrome.…

  • Geocachers Find Trinkets and Trouble

    I know there are a number of geocachers who read the Twelve Mile Circle on a regular basis, so here is a link for members of that community who may not have seen this yet. It appeared in the print edition of Washington Post this morning, and I see it is now available online: Geocachers…

  • Goodbye, Map

    Admired objects are supposed to be handled with dignity. A good example is a national flag. It’s accorded a certain respect as it fades, rips or otherwise reaches the end of its useful life. In the United States there’s even a federal law that requires such things. The flag “should be destroyed in a dignified…

  • Wisconsin’s Great River Road, Day 2

    Day 2 along Wisconsin’s portion of the Great River Road began in La Crosse. We kept the same leisurely pace as the previous day. Later in the day we strayed from a purely Wisconsin route just to liven things up a bit. We crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa using the Cassville Ferry traverse. From…

  • The 45X90 Spot

    A spot in the middle of a soybean field in north-central Wisconsin marks a confluence of great significance to people who appreciate strange geography. Two invisible lines cross near the small town of Poniatowski; one representing 45 degrees north latitude and one representing 90 degrees west longitude. The importance of this particular latitude is perhaps…

  • Charlottesville Beer Trail

    EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2009. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME. Email traffic began to pick up late last summer on the DC-Beer Listserv. Another brewpub was about to open in the rolling hills west of Charlottesville. Of course, Breweries and brewpubs had been sprouting up…

  • GPS and Genealogy – Arlington National Cemetery

    People’s willingness to share is one of the wonderful aspects of genealogy. A reader contacted me recently to provide further information about a common tangential ancestor — one not directly related to either of us but who had married into the larger family of Howder descendants — and for whom I’d had only the sketchiest…