Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: International

  • It’s Electric

    I have multiple interests that occasionally bleed over the borders of Twelve Mile Circle where they happen to merge with geography. That often includes an historical context that strays into more personal history in the form of genealogy. I’ve spent a lot of my free time on genealogy lately as I prepare for the public…

  • Carnage, Slaughter and Mayhem

    I enjoy corresponding with Steve from Connecticut Museum Quest. We seem to have a similar appreciation for maps, odd coincidences and strangely-named places. I first came across Steve and his wonderfully-written CTMQ as I investigated the Southwick Jog more than three years ago. I think Mystic Seaport may be the only Connecticut museum I’ve ever…

  • Things I Wonder

    I maintain a long list of potential topics on a spreadsheet and currently it stretches several hundred rows. Some of my story ideas remain on the sheet for months or years. That’s because they must have been interesting enough to record but not substantial enough to create a standalone article. Let me winnow down the…

  • 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…

  • Radioactive

    I follow the various geo-blogs on an RSS reader like many of you do. Google’s LatLong Blog announced an imagery update on January 9 as it does periodically. So I checked the list of improvements as is my normal custom. One of the towns updated with high resolution aerial imagery sparked my curiosity: Radium Springs,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Ticklish Canada

    Tedious would be the right way to describe my efforts to clean dead links from my ferry website over the holidays. Even that nasty task provided a nice side benefit. It offered an opportunity to view detailed portions of maps I’d not considered in awhile. That’s how I spotted Black Tickle as I repaired the…

  • Numerical Place Names

    I wondered if I could find any place names composed entirely of numbers. Thus, while communities such as Thousand Oaks and Twentynine Palms in California were interesting in a sense, they wouldn’t do for my purpose. I wanted to find places that transcended the precision of a description to reach entirely higher circles of absurdity.…

  • Vennbahn

    Google Street View finally arrived in Belgium. This offered an opportunity to revisit a topic that’s been sitting in my queue unaddressed for the longest time. I figured that most of us were familiar with the Belgian portion of the Vennbahn railroad line. This is the line that created several small German enclaves within Belgium…