Category: Water
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Border Hopping on the Welsh Marches Line
I found some border weirdness between Pontrilas in Herefordshire, England and Pandy in Monmouthshire, Wales. All would be fine in an automobile. Drive between the towns on A465, cross an unremarkable bridge over the border and continue on one’s way for an eight-minute journey (map). No big deal. Take the same trip by train however…
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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…
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Arlington County Will Grow
I stumbled across an article in the Washington Business Journal a few days ago. They called it, Over the river: Reagan National runway to be shifted into the Potomac. This probably wouldn’t mean much to most people. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority will adjust one of DCA’s notoriously short runways ever so slightly. That’s a…
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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.…
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How Many Islands in the USA Require Ferry Travel?
Just when I thought I’d examined domestic ferry routes from every possible angle, and new question arose. Longtime 12MC readers already know of my endless fascination with ferries and the saga of my formerly wildly popular ferry pages; still somewhat popular albeit Google’s love affair with them has waned. It’s a complicated relationship driven in…
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Tales from Dale
That’s Tales from Dale, which should not be confused with Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues, a brewery that is credited with jump-starting the microbrewery canning revolution. I happened to visit Oskar Blues long before their cans ever reached the East Cost, a bit of zymurgy trivia that makes me happy. I’ve now gone completely…
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Canal Becomes Subway
I wrote about Abandoned Canals in Canada several months ago. That then prompted a comment from loyal 12MC reader Bill Harris. He noted an unusual re-purposing of an abandoned canal across the border in the United States. Specifically he referenced a portion of the Erie Canal that originally flowed through downtown Rochester, NY (part of…
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Africa’s Lowpoint
I was poking around the CIA World Factbook (doesn’t everyone?) and came across an interesting page that listed “miscellaneous geographic information of significance not included elsewhere.” That’s wonderful, I thought, a page of international odds-and-ends that didn’t fit within the book’s prescribed format. Yes, I live for moments like that. It listed little tidbits on…
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(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…
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Rapid Transit in 1844
I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…