Tag: Ontario
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Runaway Truck!
I went on a brief roadtrip last Autumn, an experience I described in more detail in my Adventures along Maryland I-70/68. In that article I mentioned a massive road cut at Sideling Hill. However, I couldn’t find a reason to highlight another feature, a runaway truck ramp just west of the cut as one descends…
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The Pinetree Line
I’m not sure how I stumbled upon the Pinetree Line. It seemed to be a particularly descriptive term though. So I guess I tucked it away on my list of “things to ponder later.” It was a Cold War manifestation, an effort by Canada and the United States to provide an early warning system should…
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Airport Ferries
I’ve mentioned my strangely popular ferry pages before. They receive lots of search engine referrals in a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg manner: did the site’s success create higher rankings on search engine algorithms or did search engines create the site’s popularity, or a bit of both in a ratcheting cycle? I dunno (frankly not going…
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Back to the Lines
My fascination with lines returns as a recurring theme once again on Twelve Mile Circle, like previous articles such as Wisconsin vs. Florida, Reno vs. Los Angeles, and Glasgow vs. Madrid. I found myself thinking about lines of latitude and longitude this morning when I noticed a random search engine query that pondered whether Portland,…
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Welcome
Welcome. It sounds so welcoming when used as a town name, as if the town founders and developers genuinely wanted visitors and residents alike to enjoy their time there. It sets a nice tone and a pleasant expectation. Settlements named Welcome exist in a number of areas. I’m actually a little surprised there aren’t a…
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Definitely Halfway
I think it was back in January when I focused on the little town of Halfway, Oregon. I was pretty impressed when I thought they’d named it that way because of the nearby 45th parallel of latitude north — i.e., halfway between the equator and the North Pole. That turned out to be a false…
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Random Canada
Many months ago I toyed with an idea that I called “Throw the Dart”. That’s where I’d go into Google Street View, drop the cursor onto some random part of the world and then try to create an article from thin air. It worked pretty well in October 2009 when I hit a spot outside…
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Kenora, So Far Away
Many months ago, in what seems like a lifetime ago in the world of Twelve Mile Circle, I focused on rural Southwestern Virginia. I demonstrated through a simple mapping design that one distant corner of the state was closer to the capitals of eight other states than to its own capital of Richmond. This was…
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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.…
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South of Detroit
Here’s an old one that most people probably already know, but I still enjoy it. What is the first foreign country you would reach if you traveled due south from Detroit, Michigan? Canada! A curve in the Detroit River, the narrow ribbon of water that joins Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, creates a situation…