So in celebration, we’re posting Woodstock, Illinois, the location where most of the scenes from the excellent Bill Murray comedy of the same name were filmed (although it was actually set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania). And yes, in our thumbnail of the town square you can actually see “Gobbler’s Knob”…

For fans of the movie, the official Woodstock website has a PDF map which identifies all the locations used.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day.

Locations: Illinois, Pennsylvania / Categories: Movie Locations

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Camera facing north

The ever increasing resolution of Google’s imagery has continued to reveal greater detail people’s lives – particularly through the Street View imagery – but this is the first time an aerial photgraph of such a graphic nature has been published on the site.

Camera facing west

We can’t be sure about the details of the scene – there’s no sign of injury from this distance – but the number of police officers and vehicles (both marked and unmarked) suggests that this is unlikely to have been a case of accidental death.

Camera facing south

The location however gives us more indication of what might have happened here. This track forms the apex of an area that is known locally as the “Iron Triangle“². It’s a high crime area in the middle of a city that was in 2007 rated as the 9th most dangerous city in the United States.

There’s nothing to see in the aerial image facing east, but we can have a look from this direction on Street View – of course the imagery was captured on a different day, so nothing is revealed about the crime itself.

Can anyone locate a news report or press release about the incident so we can try and work out what actually happened here? The time stamp on Google Maps claims this image was taken in 2012, but it’s unclear how accurate this is, so a specific date could be hard to pinpoint.

Thanks to @KeirClarke.

Locations: California / Categories: 45˚ Imagery, Crowds, Street Views

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We’ll take a tour of Trollstigen², starting at the bottom where we can see several sections of the road climbing the mountain side.

With very narrow sections, eleven hairpin bends, and an average gradient of 9%, the road could fairly be described as challenging, and long buses and trucks are not allowed on it. The road is also closed by snow for several months of the year.

As we approach the first hairpin, we can see one of the waterfalls that feed the mountain stream which courses through the valley behind us.

By the fourth hairpin we’re starting to rise above the treeline and a second waterfall comes into view.

As we continue upwards we approach a stone bridge with a small parking area for people to admire the waterfall, though for some people the Street View car was apparently more interesting!

While some sections of the road have been widened, others are still very narrow, but the threat of oncoming traffic hasn’t stopped these intrepic cyclists from tackling the ascent.

By the seventh hairpin we start to get glimpses of the views awaiting from the top.³

At the penultimate turn, we can see the road below, and the full majesty of one waterfall …

… while the other cascades right next to us.

At the final hairpin we can see patches of snow on the mountainside across the valley, and the full view of the valley in the embedded Street View at the start of this post.

No more hairpins await us, but the road continues upwards through an increasingly barren landscape.

As we approach the top of the climb there is a parking area, a visitors centre and viewing platform that allows tourists to take in the scenery. While there’s currently a small range of stuff to buy⁴, there’s actually a new facility under construction which should better cater to the needs to the thousands of people who travel the Trollstigen each year.

After passing this curious monument, the road continues south through a landscape considered (by all except perhaps the most fastidious of virtual tourists), every bit as spectacular as that which we saw on the way up.

Wikipedia has a brief article about Trollstigen, but there’s more detail at the Norway tourism website. Or you can watch a motorcycle tour of the road on YouTube.

Locations: Norway / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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So what made this duck-like pattern? Perhaps it was formed by toilet waste falling from a passing aircraft? Perhaps there’s a nearby duck-cave and this marks the entrance? Caves are the perfect place for ducks to hide before launching attacks on the local populace – you know, seeing as how their quacks don’t echo in caves.

As you can see, there’s also a bit of water here (clearly showing the blue colour of the reflected sky)¹, so this is very likely the kind of place you’d find viking helmets, especially those badass ones with the horns on.

When Columbus discovered America in 1392, it was named after his daughter, Amerigo – a fitting name for the country that had already given birth to Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, and Henry Ford, inventor of the first automobile.

In other news, did you know that glass is a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature?

What we’re sure you’re wondering of course, is how we managed to find all these facts on the day that Wikipedia is blacked out in protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate – and the answer, in the words of Sherlock Holmes is “Elementary, my dear Watson”!

Locations: Not Really Sure /

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Operated by the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX – a part of Texas A&M University), these facilities host tens of thousands of emergency responders every year for cutting-edge training programs. At Brayton Fire Training Field there are eleven large-scale training setups which house a total of over 130 different props for different scenarios.

Unfortunately the satellite view doesn’t capture anything actually on fire, though the grainy first-generation Street View images do show a training session in action – we can see a column of smoke rising from one of props, with water or foam being sprayed on it.

However, the satellite images do give us a very clear view of the different props, including the aircraft rescue and firefighting section and oil processing unit.

Here we see additional oil and gas processing mock-ups, including the aerial cooler which is claimed to be the world’s largest burn prop.

There are also props for fires in various transportation modes, such as rail cars, tankers and even a ‘ship’!

In addition to the outdoor props, Brayton has several buildings for training against fires located in indoor and confined space scenarios.

To the south-east of the fire training field, Disaster City has multiple customisable scenarios in each of five different aspects of emergency-response training.

In this area we can see three different partially-collapsed buildings – industrial, strip mall and multipurpose. Each can be easily modified to portray natural or man-made disasters such as bombs, earthquakes and hurricanes. There are also two large rubble piles for training in search-and-rescue techniques in structures that have fully collapsed.

It’s unfortunate that the street view car wasn’t able to drive around this facility. I’m also disappointed that the main street is called Stillwater Road – “Disaster Drive” or “Calamity Crescent” would have been more appropriate!

This section has two more partial-collapses – a house and an office building – and a third rubble pile. In addition there is a passenger train, three cars of which have ‘derailed’ – note the red car near the locomotive which apparently caused the accident!

Finally there are many freight train tank cars in various states of disarray in the hazardous materials training section.

The TEEX website has sections for both Brayton and Disaster City. You can learn more by reading this article about Disaster City, and YouTube has videos about Brayton Fire Field and a tour of Disaster City (part one, part two).

In a similar vein, earlier this year we looked at airport emergency training locations, while in the past we have visited fake villages used by armies for training purposes, the Felix Centre bomb disposal training facility and even the Secret Service’s training centre.

Locations: Texas / Categories: Buildings, Other Vehicles, Street Views, Structures

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The first land on Earth that welcomed in the new year was this secluded tropical beach on uninhabited Caroline Island – sorry, Millennium Island, the easternmost outpost of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. Since Kiribati spans both sides of the 180° meridian, it has decided to push the international Date Line two time zones east to the eastern boundary of the country so that all of its residents operate on the same day. Millennium Island got its new name over a decade ago to commemorate it being the first land on Earth to experience the year 2000.

The first people to celebrate 2012 were the residents of Kiritmati¹ (Christmas Island), and the first people that saw sun rise on 1 January 2012 were the 1,200 residents of Kiritimati’s easternmost village, Banana. The first actual sunrise, however, occurred around this remote headland in East Antarctica (not that anyone saw it).

The country of Samoa used to be the last inhabited place on Earth to ring in the new year, but not any more. In an effort to coordinate itself better with regional powers New Zealand and Australia, on 31 December Samoa moved to the other side of the Date Line and jumped ahead a day, meaning the city of Apia was the first national capital to see the new year, an hour after Kiritmati.

Also making the move across the Date Line this year is the tiny New Zealander territory of Tokelau, an hour ahead of Samoa. Tokelau’s seat of government rotates between its three atolls, meaning that easternmost Fakaofo atoll was the first territorial capital to celebrate 2012.

With Samoa moving across the Date Line, the honour of being the last national capital to celebrate the new year is now shared by seven North American cities. Mexico City, Guatemala City, Belmopan (Belize), Tegucigalpa (Honduras), San Salvador (El Salvador), Managua (Nicaragua), and San Jose (Costa Rica) all celebrated 19 hours after Apia. We’ll show you Tegucigalpa as a cheap way to finally cross Honduras off our list of countries visited here at Google Sightseeing!

Six hours later, Alofi (Niue) and Pago Pago (American Samoa) were the last territorial capitals to say goodbye to 2011. Despite being just 50 km (30 mi) from the other half of Samoa, American Samoa is now 25 hours behind it!

Although part of the Tokelau archipelago to the northwest, Swains Island is governed by American Samoa. This open clearing is Taulaga, the only village on Swains and home of the last people on Earth who saw the sun come down on 2011.

As for the last places on Earth to leave 2011 behind, those were the remote, uninhabited United States outposts of Howland and Baker islands, some 26 hours after the people in Tokelau and eastern Kiribati did so. Considering they’re only visited every couple of years by researchers and Coast Guard vessels, it seems unlikely there was any sort of celebration taking place there at the time.

We hope 2012 is a good year for all of you, even if you don’t have as much left of it to enjoy as the American Samoans.²

Locations: Antarctica, North America, Polynesia, Samoa, U.S. Insular Areas, U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, Unincorporated territory of the U.S. / Categories: Islands, Weirdness

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Over the course of the year we published 104 new articles, which takes us up to 1,984 total posts. This means we should hopefully pass 2,000 published posts before the site’s seventh anniversary in April of this year.

But back to the highlights of 2011, a year which saw our sixth annual Volcano Week, where we even went off-planet to see the largest volcano in our solar system: Olympus Mons.

We also held our fourth Desert Week, one highlight of which was The Salton Sea, the largest body of water in California and neither a desert nor a sea…

For the rest of this year’s articles, I’ve analysed the analytics, and can now present the top ten posts of 2011 (as voted for by the unique visitors to each post – that’s you lot).

10. One of my personal favourite posts from the year, the Quirky Border Towns of North America taught us that it’s possible to read a book in two countries at once.

9. In November we visited a town built by the Disney corporation: Celebration. The town is full of fun architecture, but we were disappointed to find the “fake weather” machines weren’t pumping out unseasonal snow when Street View drove through.

8. In July, China opened what they claimed to be the “World’s Largest Cross-sea Bridge“, and an anthropomorphised Lake Pontchartrain Causeway took offense. Meanwhile, there was still no contest for the title of World’s Largest Graffiti.

7: Proving that all art is subjective, our collection of Vehicular art from December contained some brilliant, and some truly rubbish attempts at creating artworks from everyday vehicles. For my money, it’s the simple “giant rock crushing a car” that stands out as the greatest artwork here.

6. After Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May of 2011, the news was filled with stories and images of his not-at-all-hidden secret compound, which was soon discovered on Google Earth’s satellite imagery. Thanks to the historical imagery in Google Earth we were also able to see how it looked in the past.

5. Our irregular series of abandoned places continued in June with the Ghost Towns of the Palliser Triangle, featuring numerous fascinating little places in the Canadian Prairies that have been left to decay.

4. In April, North Korea Uncovered highlighted some of the most interesting finds from an exhaustive project to document the buildings and structures seen in the highly-secretive country.

3. This year, Google’s Street View service has again continued to expand into further reaches of the globe, and allowed us to live up to our “Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?” strapline – in February we took an awe-inspiring tour of some incredible scenery seen on Street View’s Most Breathtaking Rides, and nobody spent a penny on petrol.

2. In May, we discovered an actual alien spaceship on Street View. Yes, there were doubters, but nobody managed to come up with a suitable explanation for this completely Unidentified Flying Bird.

1. With well over 18,000 unique readers, the far-and-away most popular post of 2011 is perhaps a little easy to predict, as it mentioned both “nude” and “naked” in the title! Fortunately however, instead of something filthy, those 18,000 people were presented with a brilliant and insightful article that explored, um … places with, er … really smutty names (which is we suppose, one of our favourite subjects).

Many thanks to all our readers from the entire Google Sightseeing team: Alex Turnbull, James Turnbull, Noel Ballantyne, Kyle Kusch, Chris Hannigan, Ian Brown and Matt Bucher, as well as guest writers Tom Howder and David Nicol.

Of course, we’ll be doing it all over again in 2012, so make sure you keep reading for the very best in Google Maps, Street View and Google Earth sightseeing, and if you don’t already you should like, totally follow us on twitter too.

We first visited this Santa three years ago but updated Street View imagery gives us a much better look at the bright red 12m tall Saint Nick who is in the process of making his list, and checking it twice. This blog post gives a fascinating glimpse at its origins in Seattle.

Heading to Oxnard, California, we find only the top-half of a Santa who has apparently got a bad headache, judging by the hand position and big frown on his face. Maybe all the cookies, milk and glasses of whisky were too much for him? As vigilant as ever, Google has blurred the faces of the accompanying nutcrackers to protect their identities.

This 6m tall Kris Kringle is actually quite a venerable specimen, having spent 50 years on the top of a candy store before being moved to his current location eight years ago. Read the full story in this blog post or this LA Times article, which includes a slideshow.

The state of Indiana seems to have a particularly fondness for Santa Claus. We first visited the town that bears his name back in 2008, but neglected to show the large statue that sits outside the town hall, surrounded by festive red benches.

Two separate can be spotted (one standing, one sitting) outside a hotel, while on the outskirts of town is a much older statue; in fact it is claimed to be the oldest Santa statue in the world.

It dates to 1935, shortly after the town’s residents realised they lived in a locale with a name that could be exploited for commercial gain. Originally thought to be 7 metres of solid granite, time and weathering have revealed that it is in fact made of concrete! Unfortunately it is too far from the road for early Street Views to give a good view.

Not quite so blurry is the 11m tall Father Christmas found an hour’s drive to the west in Haubstadt.

Roadside America reports that the surrounding derelict buildings have been demolished, leading to fears that this Santa may disappear before too long.

Many businesses adorn their premises with statues of Santa, though generally they’re not quite as disturbing as this one in Fresno, California.

Finally, just to prove that it’s not just the US that has giant Santa statues, in Lyngen, Norway, a large Julenissen² overlooks the harbour.

If you know of any other giant Santa statues please post them in the comments.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Google Sightseeing!

Locations: Alaska, California, Indiana, Norway /

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The earthquake was recorded as magnitude 9, so powerful that Geophysicists have estimated the main Japanese island of Honshu is now 2.4 metres wider that it was before, and that the Earth itself has shifted slightly on its axis.²

In addition to the unbelievably tragic loss of life, the infrastructure of Japan was severely damaged, several nuclear reactors went into meltdown, and over 125,000 buildings were damaged or completely destroyed.

Failed reactors at the Fukushima I nuclear power plant

In an effort to assist people during the crisis, Google almost immediately launched updated satellite imagery of northeastern Japan, followed by two more rounds of additional high resolution imagery. These shocking pictures reveal an utterly destroyed landscape, with ships littering the landscape – having in some places come to rest on top of what few buildings remained standing.³

Ship on a roof, Akahama district, Otsuchi

In Higashimatsushima, the 45 metre Chōkai Maru was lifted over a pier and left aground

Elsewhere trains can be seen with their carriages piled up, having been completely swept from their tracks.

In July Google announced their intention to capture the scope of the destruction through a new initiative to create an interactive digital archive of the area, using Street View. Since then the Street View cars have driven 44,000 kilometres recording high-resolution images, and the new imagery has just been launched, alongside a new website called “Memories for the future“.⁴

Minamisanriku, August 2011

The website allows users to switch between before and after views of a wide range of affected locations in northeastern Japan. This unique project allows us to see exactly what kind of impact the tsunami has had on the landscape and its people.

Minamisanriku, July 2008

Minamisanriku, August 2011

The transformation is truly shocking. It’s unclear from the images exactly how much work has gone into removing debris, but it is clear that whole communities have been totally erased.

Higashimatsushima, July 2008

Higashimatsushima, July 2011

As Keir Clarke at Google Maps Mania said:

Let’s hope that in a couple of years Google can update the Street View imagery again to show these towns and communities rebuilt and thriving again.

Wikipedia has all the details of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Locations: Japan / Categories: Street Views

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While it may look as though 8 large trailers have plummeted nose-first from the sky, they were in fact carefully placed by Frank Bates, who happens to own a nearby RV dealership. Google’s 45-degree imagery gives us a great look at the installation from the air.

This blog post has good images and information about the trailers, and the official website has a bunch of links and a documentary video. The neighbours are less than impressed with this apparent advertising ploy, but Bates is insistent that it is a true piece of art¹ inspired by his visit to Cadillac Ranch in Texas

We visited Cadillac Ranch back in the early days of this site. The satellite imagery hasn’t improved, and while there is now a Street View, it’s sadly from the very early low-resolution systems.

We visited Carhenge – another well-known car sculpture – in our Monumental Wannabes post last year. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare apparently it’s now for sale.

We switch modes of transport briefly for a visit to a monument in Santa Rosa, California, that at first glance appears to be a fuzzy obelisk.

Closer observation reveals that it’s actually constructed of bicycle frames – three hundred and forty of them (and one tricycle) according this Wired article. Created by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector the sculpture is named Cyclisk and stands almost 20m tall.

Google’s newly-released Street View imagery of Belgium allows us to see another bicycle sculpture in the town of Brakel, which is on the route of the Tour of Flanders spring classic race.

Returning to car art, we move to Sydney, Australia, where a large rock appears to have played a key role in a terrible accident involving a red Ford Festiva.

This is actually a sculpture named Still Life With Stone and Car, by artist Jimmie Durham, and it was created through the relatively simple process of, um… dropping a large rock on a car.

Originally placed near the Opera House, the sculpture was later moved to its current location where a pair of signs help dissuade any unknowing passers-by from calling the police to report the accident.

Sadly, this kind of cruel vehicular torture isn’t isolated – in 2009 we visited two places where cars have been impaled in the name of art.

In Toronto this car appears to have been abandoned for so long that it has been reclaimed by nature.

Commonly known as The Garden Car, it is more officially called the Community Vehicular Reclamation Project. More details can be found in this blog post.

Perhaps the most bizarre vehicular artwork can be found in rural Vermont, in the form of a large concrete gorilla holding aloft a Volkswagen Beetle.

The story behind its creation can be found at Roadside America.

To wrap up, a few artworks about which I haven’t been able to find much information. First, another Airstream trailer which has been converted into a spaceship in a park in Sacramento, California.

In Albuquerque an old Chevrolet has been tiled for some reason, and mounted on top of an arch.

And finally, in Geldrop, the Netherlands, a tiny old Fiat 500 has been bronzed and topped with a statue of a girl – the work of artist Carla Rump.

If you know of any other vehicular art, please post it in the comments. I’d particularly be interested to know if anyone from Stockholm knows if this bus-made-of-cars is visible on satellite or Street View. I really wanted to include it in this post but couldn’t find a precise location for it.

Locations: Australia, Belgium, California, Florida, Netherlands, New Mexico, Ontario, Texas, Vermont / Categories: Other Vehicles, Street Views, Structures, Weirdness

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