Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Canada

  • Bus Traps

    Calgary,(1) Alberta, developed an unusual means to curtail traffic in residential areas. Simply, the city wished to prevent automobiles from taking shortcuts through its neighborhoods. However, they still wished to serve residents with convenient public transportation. So, cars bad. Buses good. Thus arose a devious little road feature called the Bus Trap. Actually, it’s more…

  • Airports Named after Fictional Characters

    Every once in awhile I post an article not necessarily for the 12MC audience, intended more as a public service to people who might come to the site for a highly specific purpose only a single time. I’m not always sure why I receive sudden website traffic surges, however I try to be accommodating. Often…

  • What the Drung?

    While we’re speaking of street suffixes — we were just speaking of street suffixes, weren’t we — and after the stravenue encounter, 12MC stumbled upon a suffix of even more weirdness: Drung. Imagine, living not on a street, an avenue, a boulevard, a drive or even a terrace, rather a drung. Drung used in this…

  • That’s Siouan for Water

    I noticed an interesting geographic prefix as I explored Minnedosa, Manitoba in Triple Letter – Canada. The same prefix also applied to one of the individual United States, specifically Minnesota. In both cases the “Minne” portion derived from a Siouan word for water. Minnedosa was Flowing Water and Minnesota was Cloudy Water. I wondered if…

  • Live Long and Prosper (burp)

    Twelve Mile Circle is all about geo-oddities although the author of the site has other interests too. Sometimes those topics collide. I’ve made no bones about my interest in craft beer and it creeps into 12MC from time to time. Today is one of those times. I noticed a passing reference to Vulcan Beer in…

  • Ferry Hopping

    I’m completely humbled by the response to the recent “How Many Islands in the USA Require Ferry Travel” article. I found 64 islands matching the criteria and stood back smugly until user-after-user uncovered additional instances that I’d overlooked. The number of islands currently stands at 77. It wouldn’t surprise me if it continued to grow.…

  • Triple Letter – Canada

    Recently I posted an article that described all of the places in the United States where the county seat, the county, and the state all began with the same letter. I considered seven instances where each of the three levels of government had completely different names to be particularly “outstanding.” For example, one was Gibson,…

  • (Mostly) Fictional Ferries

    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…

  • Oldest Continuous Businesses

    I enjoyed Wikipedia’s List of Oldest Companies when I bounced onto it randomly, and of course it included a geographic component. Using the list, I examined claims from various parts of the world. However, let’s consider that these represent claims. References and websites for individual companies often hedge their bets. They used qualifiers such as…

  • Latitudinal Border Station Extremes

    So I’m not sure the title adequately conveyed what I’m trying to describe. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better concise title to replace it either. Conceptually, I wanted to know the northernmost and southernmost places in the world and in the United States where one could cross an international border by automobile via a…