Tag: Washington

  • It’s a Mystery to Me

    I felt like a good mystery. People named a number of geographic features Mystery something-or-another. However, most of them seemed to be Mystery Lake for some mysterious reason. Generally I couldn’t find much because they were often small, existed in abundance and fell across many different English speaking countries. I discarded them. Instead I found…

  • The Border Peaks

    It’s not unusual to see an international border extend across or along a mountain range. Even Mt. Everest sits on the border between Nepal and China. Also, a border will need to be adjusted sometimes when the underlying physical characteristics of a mountain changes too. That issue confronted Italy and Switzerland several years ago as…

  • Presidential Layers

    Twelve Mile Circle discovered quite the layering of Presidential place names recently, completely by accident. I tried to find a better example during the larger part of an afternoon and never came close. Someone from the audience should feel free to post a comment with better results. Washington State George Washington as the first President…

  • Where They Lived as Children

    My recent trip to western North Carolina was like the gift that kept on giving for Twelve Mile Circle article ideas. Sadly I’ve reached the end of the line on that thread so this will be the last article that contains a connection to that earlier adventure. As noted in a prior installment, I enjoyed…

  • You Complete Me

    Washington and Idaho seemed to have a little bit of a romance going on with a couple of their towns. Their names could stand alone, however they paired rather nicely in the form of meaningful symmetry. Those names weren’t coincidental either. They were completely intentional. New and Old First came the curious case of Newport,…

  • All In a Name

    I continued to comb through my long backlog of article ideas and I found a few more possibilities, dusted off the cobwebs, and tried to assemble them into themes. One seemed to be a twist on a topic I’ve covered several times before, of towns with names more commonly associated with completely different places. Iowa…

  • 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…

  • Fighting Words

    If someone named a town “Battle” then I would expect that it might commemorate a great conflict taking place nearby. I believed most logical people would find that a reasonable conclusion. So I examined several occurrences and discovered that it wasn’t necessarily the case. Usually the battles referenced were rather inconsequential or not even battles…

  • Going Postal, Part 1

    I alluded to postal ZIP codes in the recent Zip Lines and I’ll carry that theme through the next couple of articles. I’d stumbled upon the United States Postal Service’s Fun Facts. Someday maybe I’ll explore what exactly makes a fact “fun” although for now I think I’ll simply steal liberally from that page and…

  • Woonerf

    In some places they’re called complete streets, home zones or shared spaces. However, I preferred the original Dutch term “woonerf” (pronounced VONE-erf). It described a concept as old as urban civilization itself although applied within a new context. It follows a very simple idea, a notion of streets shared by everyone. That concept took a…