Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Month: May 2016

  • New England, Part 2 (Of Course Geo-oddities)

    Of course I had to visit Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. The Twelve Mile Circle audience loved geo-oddities and I needed to deliver. I’d been to New England several times and I’ve plumbed its depths for nuggets repeatedly. What was left? Well, this lake with a really long name for one. That wasn’t the only remarkable feature in…

  • New England, Part 1 (Give me a Sign)

    I returned recently from another one of my hurried trips, this one to the New England states. All of them. Plus New York for good measure. Those of you who followed Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew that already. The rest of the 12MC audience may not have noticed anything at all. I wrote a…

  • Rotonda Elsewhere

    The Italian word rotonda means the same as the English word rotunda. They both derived from the Latin word rotundus meaning round. I’d tugged that etymological thread in Rotonda West. However, Rotonda West wasn’t the only Rotonda. Far from it. Many more existed although usually in Italy as one would expect, or in places where…

  • Rotonda West

    Rotonda West looked like a two-dimensional rendering of the Death Star transformed into a planned community along Florida’s southern Gulf Coast (map). It also had an air of familiarity, like I’d seen it somewhere before although I stumbled across it quite by accident just recently. My recollection gets a little hazy now that I’ve posted…

  • Inland Hurricane

    Hurricanes often hit the eastern parts of the United States. Generally they concentrate on the Atlantic side of the nation or along the Gulf of Mexico coastline. However, sometimes they move inland, weakening as they push away from open water. Those can cause massive flooding and damage. None of them ever pushed all the way…

  • Rock Cut, Part 2

    I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I stumbled across the existence of an entire genre of structural design known as Rock Cut Architecture, described in the previous article. I could hardly contain my glee although I still had more work ahead of me. There were so many examples from widely varied parts of the…

  • Rock Cut

    Architectural styles sometimes make it onto the pages of Twelve Mile Circle. Remember Pueblo Deco and Egyptian Revival? Then I stumbled across another noteworthy example. I considered structures I’d wondered about before, carved directly from their stony landscapes. Nonetheless, I didn’t realize at the time that it had a name, Rock Cut Architecture. This style…

  • Literal Roads to Nowhere

    Nowhere makes occasional appearances on Twelve Mile Circle. I guess I liked the underlying concept of a place of nowhere, which by definition had to be somewhere. So I mined this topic pretty hard with articles like Middle of Nowhere and X to Nowhere. I referenced it more recently in the latest Odds and Ends…

  • By George, Part 2

    With numerous places named for British Kings George I, II and III already examined and set-aside in the previous article, it was time to turn my attention to IV, V and VI. This would be more difficult. The first set of Georges ruled for a contiguous period of more than a century, from 1714 to…