Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Author: Twelve Mile Circle

  • Salty, Saltier, Saltiest, Salton

    Loyal reader “Lyn” contacted Twelve Mile Circle a few weeks ago. With it came a stack of digital images from a recent road trip to California’s Salton Sea. This has long been on my list of places I’d love to see some day, and I still hope that will happen. So I certainly enjoyed and…

  • Bluefield on the Border

    When I was asked to chauffeur a runner to a half-marathon with a course that crossed between the conjoined cities of Bluefield on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, how could I say no? A long weekend of fall foliage and geo-oddities? I felt like I was dropped into an episode of Weekend Roady.…

  • 81 on 81

    I’m planning a quick trip down to southwestern Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. Naturally I intend to count some new counties along the way although with other purposes too. I wish I could say it was entirely about the counties so I could finally finish Virginia. But that will have to wait for another day.…

  • Convergence at the End

    A weird pattern emerged as I researched an article a couple of months ago and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Was it a geo-oddity or simply an oddity? Would it fit within the subject matter of Twelve Mile Circle? Would some readers find it too bizarre? Ultimately I decided I could focus…

  • Now You See It, Now You Don’t

    I thought about rivers, specifically those with segments that disappeared for awhile. It wasn’t about completely subterranean rivers although those were certainly fascinating in their own right. Rather, it was about surface rivers with underground components. I knew they existed because I had a hazy recollection of reading about one once. How rare were they,…

  • 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…

  • Me and What Army

    The format today will be similar to the “Odds and Ends” series, a veritable pu pu platter of tasty tidbits. However, the primary difference will be that inspiration came almost entirely from the far corners of the 12MC army. I still have several other reader contributions waiting in the wings too. Please be patient if…

  • Skewed Perspective

    There was a time in the early days of Twelve Mile Circle when I used to devote entire articles to differences in distances that didn’t seem plausible, although of course the actual measurements didn’t lie. For example, sticking with the Twelve theme, the twelfth article I ever posted on 12MC all the way back in…

  • Jasper and Newton

    I got an inquiry from reader “Aaron O.” recently and it immediately interested me. That’s because he sparked my Wolf Island visit during the Riverboat Adventure the last time we corresponded. He was a county counter like many of us on 12MC including myself, and he’d encountered a curious coincidence during his collections. An Odd…

  • A Prisoner to Geo-Oddities

    I noticed a reference to a prison in Alaska that turned out to be located not too distant from where I roamed around the Kenai Peninsula during my journeys a few summers ago. It was a prison with a view, in fact it was located somewhere (map) in the background of this photo I took…