Tag: Maine

  • He Went Thata Way

    One little neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada fills me with such joy. It first came to my attention for Supreme Court and then played a starring role as Curdsen Way in Little Miss Muffet. Now it’s inspired me a final time with Thata Way. It’s pure geo-oddity gold. I’ve pretty well exhausted the neighborhood, though.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Long Distance

    I thought I would combine elements of several different articles to create something new. Counter-intuitive distances have long been a theme on 12MC. Great examples include Los Angeles located farther east than Reno and Glasgow located farther west than Madrid. Then I stirred-in an online tool used to create circles of user-specified radii on Google…

  • Back to the Lines

    My fascination with lines returns as a recurring theme once again on Twelve Mile Circle, like previous articles such as Wisconsin vs. Florida, Reno vs. Los Angeles, and Glasgow vs. Madrid. I found myself thinking about lines of latitude and longitude this morning when I noticed a random search engine query that pondered whether Portland,…

  • Nobody Wants to Visit Vinalhaven?

    I purposely feature somewhat obscure sites on the Twelve Mile Circle. Thus, my visitors tend to fall into two categories: Those who consider themselves connoisseurs of geo-oddities. Those who visit a single time because a search engine told them they should come here. Predictability I’ve become pretty adept at watching the news cycles. Often I…

  • Bakersfield: A Better California Capital?

    We had a lot of fun and some great comments during the discussion of state capitals most inconvenient to the residents of the states’ largest cities. I mentioned that I’d found the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of Population Centers by State from the year 2000 census. Naturally I took the last two questions from the…

  • Even More Unusual Signs

    It’s been about fourteen months since I posted an installment of odd signs that I’d encountered during my travels. I like unusual things whether they’re geo-oddities or mundane objects that seem out of whack. Occasionally I feel compelled to share them even if nobody else can summon the same level of enthusiasm. If they cause…

  • Isles of Shoals

    Maine and New Hampshire share a land border that continues outward into the Atlantic Ocean. There it goes straight through the middle of the mysterious Isles of Shoals. There the states share an additional land border along a causeway only a few yards wide. This map shows the Isles of Shoals, a series of rocky…

  • A Week in Maine, Part II

    We set up shop in the town of Rockland, in the heart of Maine’s midcoast region (map). This is a great staging point for daylong excursions up and down the waterfront, and out among the scattered islands accessible only by ferry. Days are pleasant, nights are cool, and light ocean breezes refresh the soul. I’ve…