Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Around the Bend

    We’re spending a great portion of our adventure in and around the vicinity of Bend, Oregon. We’ve rented a house for the week and we’re using as our home base. That has provided us with a sense of normalcy and a means to travel to numerous outdoor destinations while minimizing travel time. Once again, the…

  • Another Day with John Day

    Twelve Mile Circle feeds my on-the-ground experiences and then those experiences loop-back and feed 12MC. It’s a great circle of productivity, although I mention that with apologies for the analogy. A reader comment brought John Day to my attention, which resulted in an article, which resulted in some fascinating places to visit during my Oregon…

  • Washington State Adventures

    I’m finally in the Pacific Northwest of the United States after several months of talking about it. Actually, I’ve been out here for awhile and auto-posting articles to Twelve Mile Circle that I wrote in advance. Could you tell I wasn’t writing in real-time? The next few articles will relate to my travels through various…

  • Northernmost Romans in Britain

    Romans occupied and controlled a large southern swath of the island of Great Britain as they expanded their empire. How far north, I wondered, did they extend their empire there before it began to contract? What was their high-water mark? Hadrian’s Wall The Romans arrived on Britain in the year 43 and would remain as…

  • Who Loves 12MC in the United States?

    Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most in the United States? No surprise this time. It’s Washington, DC I examined the subset of 12MC visitors arriving on the website from the United States and compared it to state populations in order to derive per capita ratios. Yes, we all understand that the District…

  • Who Loves 12MC?

    Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most? Anguilla, apparently. I’ve tracked 12MC usage statistics for nearly five years, yet I hadn’t taken the next logical step by correlating this to per capita totals. Curiosity got the best of me and I created a simple spreadsheet comparing numbers of 12MC visitors by nations/dependent territories…

  • Longest Natural Straight Line

    I once featured a stretch of completely straight railroad track across the Nullarbor Plain. It ran an amazing 478 kilometres (297 miles), in Australia’s Longest Straight Line. I’ve also focused considerable attention on the Canada-United States border. That one hugs the 49th degree of latitude north for something like 2,000 km (1,250 mi) — although…

  • Infrequent Crossings, US-Mexico

    Things have settled down on Twelve Mile Circle after a brief weather disruption. I’m able to return to obscure United States border crossings. This second part focuses on the southern border with Mexico. So I consulted the same source that I used when I explored Canadian border crossing facts, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau…

  • We Interrupt our Regularly Scheduled Programming

    Those 12MC readers expecting to see the results of Mexican foreshadowing will have to wait a little longer. It’s been a rather wild ride in the Washington, DC area over the last couple of days. The thermometer hit 104° Fahrenheit (40° c.) on Friday afternoon. That not only shattered a temperature extreme for the date,…

  • Infrequent Crossings, US-Canada

    Twelve Mile Circle loves its borders, and probably none more than the border between Canada and the United States (for instance). The statistics are impressive: 119 border crossings; 39,254,000 trips by Canadians into the United States in 2009; and nearly $500 million in international trade passing every day on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario…

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  2. what is the total population that lives now in the land given back to Virginia should it be part of…

  5. Park ranger at Chalmette (New Orleans) Battlefield let me pull up the Union Jack 20 years ago. My dad would…