Tag: Charleston

  • USS Yorktown (CV-10)

    Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum; Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina (September 2008) We wanted to make sure we visited the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV/CVS-10) while we stayed in Charleston. Our first glimpse came as we crossed the Arthur Ravenel Bridge over the Copper River, heading into Mount Pleasant. Even here, high upon the…

  • Morris Island Lighthouse

    Charleston, South Carolina (September 2008) The Morris Island lighthouse (map) has the classic appearance of what a lighthouse “should” look like. I took this long-range photograph taken from several miles away at Fort Sumter.  It doesn’t do it much justice, but you can just make out the alternating black and white horizontal bands painted onto…

  • Fort Sumter

    Charleston Harbor, South Carolina (September 2008) The Civil War started at Fort Sumter (map) and its hallowed grounds take on mythic proportions in our collective memory. Perhaps most striking to us, therefore, was its size. It’s tiny. And the island it sits atop is barely larger. I had envisioned something much bolder, something perhaps matching…

  • Fort Moultrie

    Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina (September 2008) Sullivan’s Island brackets the northern entrance to Charleston Harbor. It seemed natural that a defensive fort should rise along the southwestern flank of the island to protect a vital port city further upstream. From this strategic spot, any ship entering the main shipping channel would pass less than a…

  • Totally Eclipsed

    Can anyone stand one more eclipse story? I promise this one will be a little different than most. I drove a thousand miles for a 4-day weekend and, well… Mother Nature had different plans. Lots of loyal Twelve Mile Circle readers asked me if I planned to see the August 21, 2017, total eclipse of…

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 2 (Vistas)

    Notions of endless horizons came to mind as I prepared for an Appalachian Loop. We would cross mountaintops, dip into hollows and follow valley flatlands along tumbling rivers amid early signs of spring. This journey promised stunning scenery in a little-visited and often under-appreciated rural preserve. People who ventured into Appalachia as tourists usually came…

  • Not the Usual State Capital Trivia

    It was time to clear my list of unwritten articles again. While doing that I noticed several of them involved state capitals, or their capitol buildings. Well, I’m not sure what the “usual” State Capital trivia might be much less the unusual. Nonetheless, let’s consider this an article on topics that the average layperson may…

  • Back to the Lines

    My fascination with lines returns as a recurring theme once again on Twelve Mile Circle, like previous articles such as Wisconsin vs. Florida, Reno vs. Los Angeles, and Glasgow vs. Madrid. I found myself thinking about lines of latitude and longitude this morning when I noticed a random search engine query that pondered whether Portland,…

  • Mistaken Identity, Part 3

    I’ve called the final installment of my series on geographic mistaken identities, Baltimore, DC. A couple of comments on the earlier articles referenced people making the wrong assumptions about airports. This is another instance of that phenomenon so I won’t dwell on it for long. Instead I’ll keep it short. That way I have room…

  • Charleston Preview

    I’ve spent the last several days in Charleston, South Carolina, and packed a lot of visiting into a short amount of time. Of course I’ll add more information to the permanent pages of my Travel Adventures site over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to give you (my regular blog readers), a sneak…