Tag: El Paso
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Cross-Country, Part 6 (The Western Half)
The first half of the drive seemed almost routine as it ran through terrain familiar to a lifelong resident of the eastern part of the United States. However we still had a couple of days to go and we began moving into unfamiliar territory. Here I captured a wide swath of previously unvisited counties straight through the…
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Colonias
I failed to mention a specific Milwaukee example in the recent I Before E Like in Milwaukie article. That was intentional. I noticed a rather unusual reference included within the Geographic Names Information System that deserved further observation. This one featured two adjoining neighborhoods. They had the dubious distinction of sharing a name with a…
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What State U
I mentioned the University of Idaho in a tangential comment on Résumé Bait and Switch. I focused on its location in Moscow, the city in Idaho not the one in Russia. However, I noticed an additional feature I didn’t discuss at the time. The western edge of the university ran amazingly close to the state…
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The Country Club Dispute
The Country Club Dispute came up from time-to-time in reader comments over the years. It’s one of those situations I’ve known about for awhile. Nonetheless, I placed in my pile of unused topics, and finally summoned enough motivation to write about today. It sounds like two snobby gentlemen with upturned noses and green blazers whacking…
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Bordersplit
I have to keep coming up with new words to describe my various geo-oddity fascinations. Today I coined “bordersplit.” It refers to an object cleaved by a boundary line. The way I figure it, if we can use landlocked legitimately then bordersplit should be treated the same way even if it doesn’t exist in a…
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Seventeen Steps from Middle
I left some unfinished business behind a few weeks ago with the Layers of Borderlocking article and it has continued to gnaw at me. As you may recall, I figured that someone standing within the boundaries of the United States would never have to travel through more than seventeen counties (eighteen if one counts the…
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Texas: Is Everything Really Bigger?
I’ve been to Texas many times. I have family there, I have business there, and I’ve driven across its width. I don’t underestimate its gargantuan size. There’s a reason why “Everything is Bigger in Texas” has become such an iconic boast that borders on cliché. If Texas were still a country as it was when…