Yard sales are an American tradition — especially along U.S. Route 127. It’s there that you can find the famous 127 Yard Sale, an annual event on the first Thursday through Sunday in August, featuring thousands of vendors on front lawns and in church parking lots in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan. All in all, the “world’s longest yard sale” covers 690 miles, starting near Addison, Michigan, and ending in Gadsen, Alabama. The inaugural event took place in 1987, when a Tennessee county executive named Mike Walker conceived of the idea to encourage travelers to bypass the big interstate highways in favor of experiencing life in more rural communities. 

The concept of a yard sale originated at old shipyards.

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The word “rummage” was originally used to describe arranging objects stowed in the hold of a ship. Upon arriving at port, sailors would take all of the leftover and damaged cargo and resell it on the pier — hence the origins of the modern phrase “rummage sale.”

Yard sales aren’t just a great way for vendors to declutter, though — they can also be a literal treasure trove. In 2013, a seemingly nondescript ceramic bowl that had been purchased at a garage sale for $3 in 2007 sold at Sotheby’s for $2.2 million; it turned out to be a 1,000-year-old piece of pottery from the Northern Song dynasty. Even the Declaration of Independence has found its way to the bargain bin — a first printing was purchased at a flea market in 1991 because the buyer wanted the picture frame. It later went on to sell at auction for $2,420,000.

Who knows what treasures await at the 127 Yard Sale? This year’s event is August 6 to August 9, so you still have time to plan your road trip.

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France’s colonial empire reached its peak centuries ago, but it hasn’t been entirely lost to history. There are still five French overseas departments today: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, Mayotte in the Mozambique Channel, Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and French Guiana in South America. 

The last of those is responsible for France’s longest border, which is with the Brazilian state of Amapá and spans 454 miles. With a population of 293,200, about half of whom live in the metropolitan area of Cayenne (the capital), French Guiana also borders Suriname to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the northeast. France itself borders Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Andorra, and Spain; the longest of those, with Spain, stretches 401 miles.

Brazil built a new city specifically to be its capital.

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Brasília was founded in 1960 to replace Rio de Janeiro as the country’s capital. Brasília is more centrally located and was intended to stimulate the economy in Brazil’s interior.

Brazil, meanwhile, borders nine other countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela; the longest of these boundaries, at 2,115 miles, is with Bolivia. (The only South American countries Brazil doesn’t border are Chile and Ecuador.) 

Inhabitants of overseas departments and regions of France (DROM) are French citizens. Their currency is the euro, they elect members of the French Parliament, and they’re beholden to French laws. French is the official language of French Guiana, but French Guianese Creole is widely spoken as well.

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When it comes to the Amazon River, there’s no such thing as water under the bridge. The idiom simply doesn’t apply there, as no bridges cross the Amazon River, despite it being at least 4,000 miles long. This isn’t because the idea has never occurred to anyone — it would just be extremely difficult to build any. The Amazon has both a dry season and a rainy season, and during the latter its waters rise 30 feet, causing 3-mile-wide crossings to grow by a factor of 10 as previously dry areas are submerged. The river bank itself is also in a near-constant state of erosion due to how soft the sediment it consists of is, and there’s no shortage of debris floating in the water.

The Amazon is the longest river in the world.

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The longest river in the world is actually the Nile, which is 4,132 miles long — about 132 miles longer than the Amazon, though counts vary. Third on the list is the Yangtze, at 3,915 miles.

Beyond all those logistical hurdles, there simply isn’t much use for bridges across the massive river. For one thing, there are few roads on either side of the Amazon that need to be connected. The river is, of course, in the middle of a dense rainforest, the vast majority of which is sparsely populated. Other long rivers have numerous crossings, however: The Nile has nine bridges in Cairo alone, for instance, and more than 100 bridges have been built across China’s Yangtze River in the last three decades. For now, boats and ferries are the preferred method of crossing the Amazon, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

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Most people logically assume the maximum time difference between any two places on Earth would be 24 hours. After all, that’s how long it takes our planet to spin once, so it seems sensible that no two points on Earth could be more than one full rotation apart. Systems crafted by humans, however, are often anything but sensible — and the actual maximum time difference on Earth is 26 hours. So where do those extra two hours come from?

The conventional time zone system runs from UTC-12 in the west to UTC+12 in the east (UTC meaning “Coordinated Universal Time”), which would produce a maximum gap of 24 hours. Within that system there are 38 offsets, which is the amount of time a specific region’s local clock is ahead of or behind UTC. UTC-12, for example, refers to a time zone that’s 12 hours behind UTC, while UTC+12 would be 12 hours ahead. 

Those offsets normally remain within the 24-hour frame, but there are places on Earth that have gone against that convention, winding up in UTC+13 (which is used in a handful of island nations in the Pacific Ocean and some research bases in Antarctica) and even UTC+14. Three places are responsible for the strange occurrence of the latter time zone: Howland Island, Baker Island, and the Line Islands of Kiribati. 

About 600 million years ago, a day on Earth lasted just 21 hours.

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Due to tidal friction caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, Earth’s rotation has been gradually slowing down throughout most of the planet’s history. Because of this, the length of a day has increased by about 1.8 milliseconds per century on average.

Howland Island and Baker Island are uninhabited coral atolls (and unincorporated U.S. territories) sitting at UTC-12, at what is considered the far west of our planet. Kiribati, meanwhile, sits in the extreme east — and is home to the peculiar time zone of UTC+14. 

Despite being more than an entire day apart on the calendar, those islands are only a few hundred miles away from each other in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to the spherical nature of the planet and the way we draw our lines of longitude. So, while it’s 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday on Howland Island and Baker Island, it can be 12:30 a.m. on a Friday in the Line Islands.

While this may seem odd, there’s a logical reason why Kiribati ended up at UTC+14. The islands were once located right on the international date line, meaning a full 24-hour gap existed within the same territory, so while it was Monday in the western islands, it was Sunday in the east.

To eliminate that confusion, Kiribati made the decision to essentially move the international date line at the very end of 1994, placing all its territories on the same date. The result was UTC+14, a time zone that shouldn’t technically exist, and a 26-hour gap between Kiribati and its Pacific neighbors.

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