Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Off Season

    I read an interesting article the other day about Chincoteague, a tiny town on Virginia’s eastern shore (map). It’s a place probably best known for its annual wild pony roundup. The ponies live on Assateague Island just a short distance away. So each year a local volunteer fire department and it’s “saltwater cowboys” swim the…

  • Not Quite Obscure Enough

    There are places so obscure that they achieve a level of notoriety in geo-oddity circles. Examples would include Loving County, Texas and Kalawao County, Hawaii, which are both revered in the county counting community. No county has fewer residents than Loving with only 82 people recorded in the 2010 Decennial Census. Kalawao comes in a…

  • 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…

  • Google Maps County Lines Imminent?

    At long last, I think we are getting very close to seeing county lines on Google Maps. I noticed them earlier today but they’ve since disappeared. I also observed numerous town boundaries, and in a couple of instances, even neighborhood boundaries. I believe the folks at Google are experimenting with various displays: some of what…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 2

    I went through a bit of an exercise to uncover the extreme eastern and western longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48 United States, in Part 1. These points looked rather striking when I placed them in a map. Now, let’s look a little closer at the eight points individually. I consider…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 1

    I’ve noted my appreciation for random visitors on many occasions. They serve as an amazing source of accidental topics. This time an anonymous lurker wished to find the easternmost extreme of the U.S. Central Time Zone. Why stop there, I figured? What are the extreme longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48…

  • Disestablished National Parks

    Last summer 12MC reader “Scott” provided me with a boatload of National Park trivia. I continue to mine that for article suggestions. With that, I’m going pursue an angle that might be little known, or maybe just to me. One often thinks of everything associated with National Parks as perpetual. After all, their goals include…

  • Easiest Five

    The Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona intersect at a quadripoint, is the quickest way to visit four of the United States. The distance between the states, by definition, equals zero. I’ve experienced that myself a couple of times: I was asked a question quite awhile ago but only checked into an…

  • Jamestown Field Trip

    I had the pleasure of serving as a parent chaperone for my son’s school field trip to Jamestown last week. Admittedly, the thought of accompanying two busloads of children aged nine-to-ten sounded a bit daunting. And of course it definitely had its challenges at times. I thought it was going to unfold like an uglier…

Latest Comments

  1. I’ve enjoyed your Hawaii reports. I’ve visited 4 times, between 1976 and 2007, but no plans to return. In 1976…

  2. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  4. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  5. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…