Sometimes I wonder if I’m the last person to find out about things. A reader who identified himself as "Jasper" mentioned a $100 hamburger when I put out a call for southeastern Kentucky travel suggestions. I thought he was referring literally to a hundred dollar hamburger. Such a thing does indeed exist so I didn’t rule it out as a possibility. Maybe he had a thing for ground beef wrapped in gold foil, infused with truffles and rolled in caviar, or something. I don’t know. I try not to make value judgments (and generally fail miserably).
Jasper provided a convenient link to explain the hamburger reference as term of art used in general aviation in the United States (perhaps with variations on the theme elsewhere?). A lot of pilots like to pick a random airport a couple or a few hours away, drop-in for a meal, refuel, and then take off again to fly back home. The sheer joy of flying seems to serve as the primary motivation, like someone taking a sports car out into the countryside for a weekend getaway. The $100 price tag refers to the cost of flying to a distant runway for no reason other than wanting to fly to it, and not specifically to any meal that may have been purchased there. It’s a euphemism, or a wink-and-a-nod, or both, even though fuel prices today would make a hundred dollar round-trip flight a bargain.
This sounds like the most awesome idea ever. I’d be all over it if I were a pilot. My county counting abilities would be over the top, too.
I had to check into this further. Various sources mentioned anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 different fly-in restaurants. The 100 Dollar Hamburger is a website for a book with the same name that provides a compendium of such locations although it requires a subscription. A competing site provides a similar service and takes pride in NOT requiring a subscription. Do I detect some bitterness, perhaps?
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Jasper said he flew into London-Corbin airport for his $100 hamburger, stopping at The Hangar Restaurant found on-site there. That’s an example of a restaurant AT the airport, probably offered as a service by the airport’s fixed-based operator (FBO). It surprised me how commonly general aviation airports provided restaurants within their facilities, albeit usually in the larger ones. Their clientele extended beyond $100 hamburgers, though. Fly-in restaurants are patronized by airport staff and also by plenty of local residents especially in the smaller towns.
I consulted several websites in search of the best $100 hamburgers. One source included a list compiled in 2011. I can’t vouch for Rick’s Crabby Cowboy in Montauk, NY (map) or the Pik-N-Pig at Gilliam-McConnel airfield in Carthage, NC, although I liked both of their names so I thought I’d give them a mention.
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The Hard Eight at Clark Field in Stephenville, Texas, came up on the list and also on several website forums where pilots share information. I figured those mentions qualified the Hard Eight as one of the better $100 hamburger opportunities. It was an example of a restaurant NEAR an airport, and looked to be about a ten minute walk.
Flickr by JMD Pix via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license
I think my favorite location might have to be the Beaumont Hotel in Kansas (map). It’s a Bed & Breakfast inn, it’s a restaurant, AND it has its own dedicated turf runway. The hotel reportedly averaged about 38 aircraft operations per week.
Thank you Jasper for acquainting me with the $100 hamburger concept.
Completely Unrelated
Has anyone managed to snag an invitation for the test version of the new Google Maps? Does anyone know how I can get one? — I did submit a request although I haven’t heard back. What’s a geo-geek gotta do to get a little map love?
I receive an inordinate amount of visitor traffic on my Ferry Maps of the World site. Very few of those hits come from 12MC readers. It’s basically a lot of one-and-done landings from people who never return to the website ever again. Google decided it didn’t like me about a year ago or I was SEO’ed into irrelevance so the traffic has dropped considerably, however, it still doubles or triples the volume of what I see on Twelve Mile Circle on any given day.
The 12MC audience doesn’t have a reason to know or care about this curious circumstance other than it offers a fascinating insight into the random travel thoughts of the larger world. The site answers most visitor questions with ease. It doesn’t deal well with certain esoteric queries. I’ve observed and compiled a list of frequently requested "wishful thinking" ferry lines that do not exist. Some of them have a grain of truth behind them while others are rather more fanciful. The common denominator is that many people believe these routes exist, or perhaps want to hope that they exist, and seek to know how to take advantage of them.
Ferry lines are expensive. I don’t suggest that any of these fictional lines might ever be feasible financially or geographically. My point is that I wish they existed because they sound interesting and because they’d have an immediate set of customers based upon my observation of search patterns.
Galveston – New Orleans Line
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A Galveston, Texas to New Orleans, Louisiana ferry has never existed to my knowledge. Nonetheless, this is by far the most commonly requested fictional route. I’ve observed a lot of chatter about the Galveston-Port Bolivar Ferry over the years. It offers a convenient means to bypass Houston traffic for those living on the southern side of the city who wish to travel onward to Interstate 10, heading to New Orleans or beyond. However, the queries I’ve seen are something different. Lots of people seem to want to avoid I-10 altogether by hugging the Gulf of Mexico shoreline in a boat for hundreds of miles.
It could be done. Ships navigate the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River all of the time. Personal watercraft also Cruise the Intracostal Waterway from Galveston to New Orleans albeit with some inconveniences:
At the moment there are no marinas along the 350-mile stretch — all the recreational boating facilities that once existed were wiped out by the series of powerful hurricanes (Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike) that have battered the area. What’s more, there are plenty of obstacles in these waters, including commercial shipping traffic, barges, and off-shore oil-field equipment.
Traffic will need to hit a much higher degree of gridlock I believe, before it reaches sufficient critical mass to justify a ferry.
New Orleans – Key West Line
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A ferry line between New Orleans, Louisiana and Key West, Florida comes up less frequently than the Galveston route, although it still makes regular appearances. This one also arrives with a number of variations. Sometimes the embarkation point is farther east than New Orleans while debarkation points range along the entire length of Florida’s Gulf Coast, with Key West the logical extreme.
This one has a grain of truth. Ferry service exists from Fort Myers Beach and San Marco Island to Key West on Key West Express. The route eliminates a 300 mile drive including the entire Overseas Highway that hops atop the Keys (map). That’s often touted as one of the most beautiful drives in the world. However, from repeated experience, I can say with all honesty that it can also be a traffic-clogged multi-hour nightmare. The Overseas Highway provides more than abundant incentive to justify a ferry.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could string Galveston to New Orleans to Key West together into a single line, and cruise the entire northern arc of the Gulf of Mexico? Yes, it would. It’s also never going to happen.
Trans-Caribbean Route
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I simply love the thought of a Trans-Caribbean Route. Imagine rolling onto a ferry and skipping from island-to-island, driving off at the paradise of your choice, dawdling as long as you liked before moving on, and having your own automobile with you the whole time. That would be wonderful. It would also be wishful thinking.
The fictional routes I’ve observe tend to vary. Often they start at Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands although more ambitious fantasies begin all the way back in Florida and island-hop the entire length of the eastern Caribbean to South America.
Ferry service in the Caribbean tends to be spotty and subject to frequent change. It’s hard to maintain up-to-date maps of what even exists at any given time. It’s not practical to cobble together a trans-Caribbean route, much less with an automobile. Ferry boats can’t replicate cruise ships in these waters.
Chesapeake Bay Route
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Chesapeake Bay car ferries once existed as I’ve noted previously. They became obsolete overnight due to the bridges — amazing engineering marvels really — that were strung across the mouth of the bay and the midpoint. That doesn’t stop people from searching for those old ferry lines, whether from a feeling of nostalgia or an ancient lingering memory. I receive lots of hopeful visitors hitting the site for that purpose.
One can still cross the Chesapeake Bay by ferry today, by sailing from the western to eastern shores via Smith Island in Maryland or Tangier Island in Virginia. These are passenger-only routes (no automobiles) and they are not particularly efficient either, but it’s possible to cross the bay by ferry. I categorize the Chesapeake Bay Route within the "grain of truth" category.
Great Lakes International
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Lots of people seem to want to cross between Canada and the United States by ferry. This has much more than a grain of truth. It happens all the time. One can cross from numerous places in British Columbia and Washington in the Pacific Northwest. There are also several ferry crossings between southwestern Ontario and Michigan’s lower peninsula, even for trucks! That’s not what my searchers seemed to want, though. They were seeking routes across the width of the Great Lakes.
And why not? A couple of different ferry lines cross Lake Michigan within the boundaries of the United States (my experience, for example). Also there was a fast ferry that ran across Lake Ontario between Toronto, ON and Rochester, NY. It lasted only three years (2004-2006) before succumbing to financial difficulties. Additionally one can hop across the western side of Lake Erie via Pelee Island, ON (map) and take an automobile.
I’m not sure it’s feasible as a shortcut or as a time-saver, which is what people seem to want, however the service does exist for one of the four Great Lakes shared by Canada and the United States. The other three? Car ferries remain fictional for now.
The East Coaster
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Wow. This one is really ambitious. I’m not sure if people seek this alternative because traffic on Interstate 95 is so awful or because they are geographically challenged, or both. The route almost always extends from some point in New York (often Long Island) to a point in South Florida, without any intermediate stops. This wouldn’t be as much a ferry as a voyage. I can’t discount the logic of attempting to avoid the monstrosity that’s known as Interstate 95; I hate it as much as anyone. Nonetheless this represents exterme wishful thinking.
It seemed to me that I would have written an article about the shortest international border a long time ago although it appeared I’d overlooked it. Let’s rectify that oversight.
The omission actually provided a benefit. Just about every one of these places was already featured in a previous Twelve Mile Circle article in a different context. That allowed me to combine a new article with a collection of "greatest hits."
I’ll start with a small number of caveats and clarifications. First, I’ll focus on truly international borders between independent and sovereign states. That eliminated very short borders between the People’s Republic of China and Macau and Hong Kong, for example. I also decided to duck controversies so don’t expect coverage of another brief boundary, the one between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Finally I wanted to examine land borders specifically although narrow water boundaries such as the width of a river was acceptable.
Every border examined stretched less than 20 kilometres according to Wikipedia’s List of countries and territories by land borders
What was the shortest border? That’s not an easy question; it could be a toss-up.
SOURCE: flickr by By Ruth Flickr via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
Crossing the World’s Shortest Border
The honor may go to the border between Botswana and Zambia which at most stretches 150 metres, and is the pivotal location that may come closest to being an international quadripoint when combined with Namibia and Zimbabwe (map). I featured this unusual configuration in the context of Namibia’s Caprivi Strip quite awhile ago in an article called "What Happened to the Handle?" A visitor can actually cross this tiniest of borders on the Kazungula Ferry.
The other contender may be found between India an Sri Lanka. There are various claims that one of the shoals that forms Rama Setu (Adam’s Bridge) may actually fall along the boundary between the two nations (map). That would put a land border at 100-ish metres in length if it actually exists. That’s why I tend to discount the claimant, though. It’s not a particularly feasible place to walk across assuming it’s even real.
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The land border between Spain and the United Kingdom at Gibraltar would probably be the most convenient option for the majority of the audience although it’s considerably longer than the first two instances. It stretches about ten times farther, at 1.2 km. Gibraltar earned a previous 12MC nod because a public road crossed directly over an active runway at the local airport. Street View now provides decent coverage of said road and it’s pretty memorable.
Europe made it onto the list multiple times because of a plethora of small states. The boundary between Italy and Vatican City came next, at 3.2 km. I didn’t want to dwell too much on Vatican City because it’s a frequent outlier and has been featured several times previously including in National Capitals Closest Together. I’ll mention a 2009 comment from the ever-loyal "Greg," who still reads 12MC all these years lager and continues to comment on articles. I was trying to generate 12MC hits from various places not yet represented at the time and Greg said,
Matter of fact, a friend of mine was recently at the Vatican visiting a family member, and I know he visited your site while he was there, because he emailed me about your post on the Wakhan Salient, which was published at the time. Maybe his internet, however it was set up, went through a .it ISP?
Sadly I still haven’t recorded a Vatican hit so I think there may be some merit to his Italian-based Internet Service Provider theory.
The 4.4 km border between France and Monaco followed. I focused on Monaco in Almost Landlocked and I don’t really have any more to add. Monaco is another one of those places that comes-up frequently in geo-oddity trivia.
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Then came the 9 km boundary between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Turkey has an odd dangling appendage that’s nearly snipped-off between Iran, Armenia and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic exclave of Azerbaijan. This area of tightly packed international neighbors was featured in Fictional Geo-Marathons.
Of course I can’t forget the border between France and the Netherlands. It doesn’t occur in Europe, rather it happens on the Caribbean island that they share between them, Saint Martin / Sint Maarten. I was fortunate enough to explore this 10.2 km frontier extensively in person a couple of years ago and reported my finding to the 12MC community in Saint Martin Borders and Boundaries
The final two spots to round-out the international borders of less than 20 km are Morocco and Spain at 17 km, via various Spanish outposts such as Ceuta, Melilla, and Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera; and the 19km border between North Korea and Russia.
