Author: Twelve Mile Circle
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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,…
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Nimby Lane
Twelve Mile Circle has an international audience so I’m never sure whether a term that’s part of my lexicon translates geographically. Many readers probably know the term NIMBY. For the rest of you, and particularly the foreign-language readers, NIMBY is an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard.” As defined by Dictionary.com NIMBY is… “…used…
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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…
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Reader Mailbag 2
Every once in awhile I receive an overwhelming number of excellent finds from the Twelve Mile Circle community. Last time I called the collection “Reader Mailbag.” I simply tacked the number 2 onto that older title in a nod to my lack of creativity for the current installment. To be considered for the Reader Mailbag…
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Great Allegheny Passage, Day 4 (Meyersdale to Cumberland)
The final day, like the end of all great adventures, was bittersweet. Nobody wanted to stop and yet we all had our lives to get back to and our responsibilities awaiting us that needed attention the next day. Most of the day’s ride would fly noticeably downhill. All of the gradual elevation we’d earned over…
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Great Allegheny Passage, Day 3 (Ohiopyle to Meyersdale)
We pushed deeper into the trip, halfway done as we pedaled out of Ohiopyle on the morning of the third day. We intended to cover the same distance as the previous day, a little more than forty miles, although we’d gain a thousand feet of elevation while reaching the town with the highest altitude along…
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Great Allegheny Passage, Day 2 (West Newton to Ohiopyle)
The second day of biking on the Great Allegheny Passage may have been my favorite. The rain lifted overnight and conditions improved with lightly cloudy skies, neither too hot nor too cool. Scenery changed from rust belt chic to thick forest hugging a scenic whitewater river. It was our first complete day of biking without…
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Great Allegheny Passage, Day 1 (Pittsburgh to West Newton)
I fretted about my upcoming bicycle trek along the Great Allegheny Passage trail. My attitude got stuck somewhere between nervousness and fear. I’d never attempted anything like it before, a 150 mile (240 kilometre) rails-to-trails ride between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. Confronting My Fears Every time I conquered a fear I created a new…
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Avoiding the Temptation
It sat there in front of me, so tempting, so wanting to be bestowed with a clickbait title on this 12MC article. I could have called it Sex Folk or maybe Folk Sex. Certainly that would have attracted some undeserved attention and a few extra eyeballs. However, for what purpose? People who come to the…
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How Tautological
Previously I noted the inherent redundancy of places named River Ouse in England. The literal translation worked out to something like Water River or even River River. Similar repetitions occurred likewise wherever one language overlapped another. That happened as new settlers migrated into territory occupied and named previously by earlier cultures. Then I found a…