Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Cities/Towns

  • What? Tonga Too?

    It was only four days ago that I bragged and crowed that I’d recorded a website visitor from the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Now, apparently Christmas came a little late on Twelve Mile Circle. Someone just landed here from Tonga! It wasn’t a grab-and-dash either. Our mystery visitor stuck around for three page…

  • Cross-Province Municipalities

    Usually towns that rest upon a border are distinct entities. They may have the appearance of a single contiguous municipality but often that’s deceiving. Two separate local governments actually administer the two separate portions. Kansas City along the Missouri/Kansas border comes to mind: one metropolitan area; same name; different municipal governments. However there are two…

  • And Now Vanuatu

    I love it when a new visitor arrives on Twelve Mile Circle from a previously unrepresented geographic location. Now I can focus on another spot on the globe while simultaneously carving a new notch on my visitor map. So today the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu checked in! Some of you are probably thinking,…

  • Llivia & Ile des Faisans

    Today marks a special occasion on Twelve Mile Circle, with its first ever guest blogger, Matthias Gries from France. He has researched a couple of French geo-anomalies that fit in well with the spirit and content of this blog and has written a lively narrative to accompany it. I hope you enjoy his effort —…

  • The Stranded Airport

    Twelve Mile Circle has a fascination with little chunks of land stranded on the “wrong” sides of rivers that occur when waterways change course. Usually this happens when severe flooding digs a new channel through a gradually sloping area of relatively soft soil. I noticed just such a spot in St. Joseph, Missouri awhile ago…

  • Shortest River… or Not

    What is a river, exactly? In all seriousness, what differentiates a river from a creek, a brook, a run or some of the other watercourses mapped on Toponymia? Clearly it comes down to size and volume. But where does one draw the line between what should be called a “river” and what should not? So…

  • Reverberations of a Doomed Expedition

    What possibly could the tattooed mayor of a small rustbelt town, a subway station in an urbanized corridor and the towering historical legacy of George Washington all have in common? If you guessed a failed 1755 British military expedition then you would be correct. I imagine many of you probably guessed wrong. Twelve Mile Circle…

  • Amazing Australian Road Distances

    Colin, a reader from South Hedland in Western Australia, sensed my dismay with the long distance displayed on a particular Texas road sign. He offered to share some extreme examples from his homeland.(1) My sign noted that El Paso, on the other side of the state, was 857 miles (1,380 kilometres) away. That’s pretty good…

  • Enclaves within Dhekelia

    Cyprus. One island split so many different ways. There’s the de facto partitioning between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. And there’s the United Nations buffer zone created along the ceasefire line. Finally, there’s the British Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia. This isn’t about any of those divisions. Rather the three, well actually four, tiny…

  • Let it Snow!

    It’s snowing here in the Washington, DC area today. Already they’re calling it the snowpocalypse, the snownami, and of course “The Blizzard of 2009”. People around here tend to overreact when it snows because we don’t generally get large accumulations. Naturally everyone stripped the grocery stores bare of milk, bread, and toilet paper as it…