Month: January 2015

  • 2015 Travel Plans

    Twelve Mile Circle has some bold travel plans for 2015 if I do say so myself. I’ll keep it domestic this year unlike 2014 although I might cross the border into Canada briefly during one of the trips. As always, I welcome assistance as I begin my initial planning. Please feel free to offer comments…

  • Hairy Man

    I don’t know why I started wondering about Bigfoot this morning. Yes, the actual Bigfoot, as in Sasquatch the large mysterious cryptid hominid of North America’s Pacific Northwest region. I don’t put much faith in the whole Bigfoot phenomenon because I think one would have been discovered by now if it existed, making it all…

  • Bogus

    The word “bogus” had a murky history. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it may have dated back as far as 1827, used in Ohio as a slang term for a counterfeiter’s apparatus. Somehow it became the name of a machine used to manufacture fake coins. Then bogus became counterfeit or fake in a more…

  • Undignified Floods

    Floods are awful in any form and I don’t wish to diminish or make light of that one overriding consideration. However there are floods of a “normal” variety — if an event so awful can be referred to so cavalierly — and then there are the truly bizarre. Either way, it leaves behind lost lives,…

  • World’s Fair Towers

    I suppose this is something of a Part 3 addendum to the recent Southern Swing articles although maybe it’s not truly the case. Perhaps it would be better to call it “inspired” by those earlier articles. We broke the return trip into a two-day event with an overnight stay in Knoxville, Tennessee. The hotel happened…

  • Southern Swing, Part 2

    The second part of my quick southern trip moved west. We began in St. Augustine, Florida a couple of days earlier and now it was time to move on to family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This transformed into an exercise in county counting. My completion map of Florida counties changed dramatically for the better…

  • Southern Swing, Part 1

    I still hate airlines. I don’t fear flying, I simply want to withhold my money from those greedy [censored] until the tight squeeze of market forces compel them to start treating their passengers with a little respect. I’m pretty much at the point where I’ll drive to any destination of a thousand miles or even…

  • High Level

    It began with High Level, in Alberta, Canada. I came across the name and wondered what made it so special. It didn’t seem to be all that high level. In fact it appeared to be downright flat at an elevation of 325 metres (1,066 feet) atop the Canadian Prairies. Well, being that far north I…