Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Author: Twelve Mile Circle

  • Eric Henn Murals

    A couple of articles featured Circleville, Ohio earlier this year, Square the Circle and Circleville Survived. I’d honed in on this otherwise nondescript town because anything with a circle was fair game for Twelve Mile Circle. And I actually discovered a few fascinating tidbits, confirming once again that geo-oddities existed everywhere. One such item included…

  • Comparison Nicknames

    I enjoyed reading Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames recently. My amusement didn’t come from the familiar nicknames I already knew, rather it derived from the nicknames I never knew existed. Alabama was the Lizard State? Really? Did anyone else know that? Then I noticed that several of the states featured nicknames that compared them…

  • More Endorheic in Europe

    I have a mild obsession with endorheic basins. Those are magical places where water flows into them and never flows out except through evaporation. They’ve appeared several times on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle over the years. I’ve even discussed an example in Europe before, Lake Neusiedl on the border between Austria and Hungary.…

  • Airports in the District of Columbia

    Let’s refer back to the Airport Visits article. At that time I claimed that no airport existed within the physical boundaries of the District of Columbia. So unfortunately that would block me from ever traveling through airports in every state/territory/district in the United States. However, I want to put a little asterisk next to the…

  • Airport Visits

    All that talk of doughnut county captures and airport-only visits in Counting Down a few days ago led me to consider that I’d been to a lot of airports during my wanderings over the years. One would think that I would have counted all of those before, seeing how I make lists of just about…

  • Oglala Lakota County

    I pointed out that the the Wade Hampton Census Area in Alaska became the Kusilvak Census Area in a recent Reader Mailbag article. Alaska’s census areas exists as a unique construct. They serve as a convenient parceling of the Unorganized Borough while being considered “county equivalents” by the Federal government for a number of statistical…

  • Counting Down

    Most comments on Twelve Mile Circle are made to articles written recently, primarily to those posted within the past few days. That doesn’t prevent readers from commenting on older articles though. I leave the comment window open indefinitely. People wander their way to the site however they manage to do it, and I assume most…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 6 (Inspirations)

    I made it to the final installment of the Center of the Nation articles at long last. I hope the Twelve Mile Circle audience enjoyed riding along vicariously. I included links to all of the previous articles at the bottom of the page for those who may have missed a few. I figured I’d wrap…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 5 (Wildlife)

    My route crossed paths with all sorts of wildlife, some more wild than others as we rolled through endless terrain in a land largely devoid of people. We never pushed deep into backcountry so I didn’t see anything too exotic — and no rattlesnakes thank goodness, which were supposedly quite common — still our roadside…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 4 (Terrain)

    There weren’t a lot of people on the Northern Plains and their settlements appeared only sporadically. Out there amongst the expansive void a place of a thousand residents qualified as a city and drivers might not see another one for an hour. I wondered, where did people even buy their groceries? That didn’t mean the…