Does a bridge count as a land crossing?
In the late 1970s my father had a boat on Lake Erie between Port Clinton and Lakeside, Ohio. One weekend we boated to Leamington, Ontario, and spent the weekend there. When we first arrived, I recall my father having to go to the marina’s office to fill out some paperwork. (And a border patrol agent might have inspected our boat; I don’t recall.) It all seemed routine. I am not sure what the procedure is today.
Oh, and at least one person has walked from Ohio to Canada, directly.
Of course it does. I have driven across that particular bridge, from the town in the US that has the same name as the adjacent town in Canada.
Does Lake Erie freeze solid enough to walk across these days?
I asked because of the discussion of lake borders. Lake Erie is a water border, but a (hypothetical) bridge across would turn that into a land border, then. I wasn’t sure how people were thinking about it.
Sometimes. But I’m not sure if it’s even every winter, now.
I see now that I was mistaken: Wisconsin does not have a border with Canada. The way the lines are drawn on the lake, Wisconsin’s share of Lake Superior is enclosed in the parts that belong to Minnesota and Michigan.
Many border crossings are bridges over rivers. Detroit, Buffalo/Niagara Falls, to name a few. Some sticklers might not consider them land/land crossings and they would be technically correct. But “correct” would depend on context. For a trivia game, they might not be. For practical conversation any place you can drive a car across the border would count as a land crossing.
As long as we’re in random facts, how about the fact that driving from Detroit to Windsor takes you almost due southeast.
The entirety (maybe there are some small exceptions) of the US and Mexico is a river, some would say a big one.
Man, I know it’s humid around here, but I didn’t realize it was that humid.
But assuming you meant the border, not the entirety of both countries, I’m not sure how you’re accounting for the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
The wikiarticle on the US-México border is interesting. In the spirit of fighting ignorance, here it is.
I was surprised by this, but when I dove in I saw that Lake Superior is further subdivided into sections. I wonder when and why this occurred. A quick search doesn’t bring up anything, although the 1925 border negotiations with Canada might explain it.
The triangular portion at the bottom appears to encompass all of Wisconsin’s land touching Lake Superior, pushing the state’s boundary out into the lake.
The Minnesota state boundary also pushes out to the middle of the lake, all of it apparently south of the fat border line. But sources say that is in fact the international border. Other maps have exactly the same imagery. From them I would have thought that only Michigan’s water touched the border.
Anybody understand this? Or maybe @JKellyMap could take a look and explain what’s going on.
Thanks for that. I was thinking way too local
One interesting thing I learned from that article is that (for that section of the border) the river is defined as the border, such that, when the river changes course, land is automatically transferred between the countries.
I thought I’d throw this one out there as a haven’t been by here in the last (looks at wristwatch) 6 or 7 years.
I literally did stumble into this random fact. I’m a very clumsy person and in my younger days I would often sprain an ankle. One time I happened to sprain both ankles.
Because of that, I know the answer to the question, “If you sprain both ankles, do you still limp?”
The answer is -no!
As with most large bodies of water with different political territories on each shoreline, the boundary line through Lake Superior generally tries to follow an approximation of the middle of the lake. As you can see in (say) Google Maps, this works well for most of the boundary between Ontario (Canada) and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (US). The exception is where it comes close to the Canada shoreline near Thunder Bay (and thence to the Minnesota/Canada/Michigan triple juncture); this is because Isle Royale was granted to the US (in 1783 - Treaty of Paris).
This procedure also works well for most of the boundary between Wisconsin and Minnesota – but once you go out a certain distance in the middle of the lake (heading northeast from Duluth), you get to a point where the Michigan and Minnesota shores are closer to each other than either is to the Wisconsin shore, so Wisconsin’s “participation” in this ends.
If you combine these two facts, it’s clear why Wisconsin never gets closer than about 70 miles from the Canadian border.
It looks like there is a piece of Minnesota land called pidgeon Pt, at the mouth of the Pidgeon river that defines that part of the border. The line runs just north of the Point, meets the Michigan line and turns hard west by south toward Superior. If someone told me Minnesota borders on Michigan, I would have looked at them funny.
We always marveled at the “border security” in the boundary waters of Minnesota, where people regularly paddled between Canada and the US. We’d occasionally see signs that said “Foreign Visitors Please Check In At U.S.A. Customs”.
Later, driving into one of the small towns, we saw a tiny sign, “U.S.A. Customs” next to a back door of the post office. No one was there in the middle of a business day, door was locked.
I often wonder if our longest border is still that porous.
The Batsignal does work! How are things in Gotham City?
Thanks for swinging in. I guess I can see how the distance to the individual states becomes an issue. I hadn’t realized that Isle Royale is part of Michigan and that explains a lot.
The Wiki page I linked gives a tangled history of ownership.
Isle Royale was given to the United States by the 1783 treaty with Great Britain, but the British remained in control until after the War of 1812, and the Ojibwa peoples considered the island to be their territory. The Ojibwas ceded the island to the U.S. in the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe, with the Grand Portage Band unaware that neither they nor Isle Royale were in British territory. With the clarification to the Ojibwas of the 1842 Webster–Ashburton Treaty that was signed before the Treaty of La Pointe, the Ojibwas re-affirmed the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe in the 1844 Isle Royale Agreement, with the Grand Portage Band signing the agreement as an addendum to the 1842 treaty.
Michigan became a state in 1837, before the Treaty signing. Who exactly owned the island for those five years is probably part of somebody’s dissertation.
Getting back to the OP. . .
Amanda Knox was completely exonerated, and some other guy was convicted. I had never paid a lot of attention to the story, so it was news to me.
Is this thread current? … I learned today Germany has flooded old mine pits and made them into recreational lakes. I don’t know any details, or if fish and wildlife can live in them, but I thought that was rather awesome.