Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Cities/Towns

  • Kansas Mountain Time

    Loyal reader Mr. Burns pointed out that my intended Dust Bowl route will traverse a psuedo-geo-oddity. I’ll move from Central Time to Mountain time while heading due north. That happens in other places sporadically, although not as rarely as moving east from Mountain Time into Pacific Time for example. One can’t be too choosy in…

  • Extreme Reservations

    It started out as it often does through a chance encounter with a roadmap anomaly. I happened to be examining a stretch of highway online. Then I spied an uncharacteristically wide split between the westbound and eastbound lanes of Interstate 84 directly outside of Pendleton, Oregon. It seemed quite remarkable. A mountain ridge forced opposing…

  • Life is Hard

    Did anyone else notice the oddly-named park immediately to the east of Social Circle, Georgia when I posted The Chunk that Got Away in December? Well, I did. And I made a record of it intending to return later. Hard Labor Creek had to have a story. Places like that don’t get their names accidentally.…

  • Fill the Dust Bowl

    I posted an article last August about five marathons in five states in five days planned for March 2013. I didn’t intend to run, rather my goal was to convince my favorite runner to participate (in the half-marathon option). That would allow me to tag along to give moral support while pursuing various geo-oddity adventures.…

  • History Vegas Style

    Going out-of-town for the holidays to a small town where temperatures never cracked above freezing provided lots of contemplation time. It also offered abundant exercise opportunities for my right thumb via a television remote control. I’m an historian by training, so as one might expect I gravitate towards the History Channel and its ilk. Has…

  • Frank Sinatra’s Drive

    As Ol’ Blue Eyes — Francis Albert “Frank” Sinatra — so famously sang: If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere It’s up to you Hoboken, Hoboken Say what?!? Frank Sinatra arrived in this world in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1915, not New York City, and he lived his first couple of decades…

  • Short Distance Namesakes

    Something has been bothering me since I mentioned the town of Washington, Virginia recently in Flip-Flopping. It claims title to the oldest town named for George Washington, platted by none other than George Washington himself in 1749. I noted that many call it Little Washington to differentiate it from nearby Washington, DC which dates to…

  • Highest Religious Affiliation

    I’ve been spending a little time on the Religion Census 2010 website. It includes a wealth of maps and numerical tables which I’m sure to draw upon for future articles. But a few data extremes came to the forefront of my mind immediately as I leafed through some of the reports. First, don’t confuse this…

  • The Chunk That Got Away

    Social Circle, Georgia would seem to hit all of the highpoints necessary for coverage on Twelve Mile Circle (map). It has an odd name (Social Circle?). Also it has the word “circle” in its title just like the humble 12MC itself. Finally, it is one of those unusual Georgia towns with an actual circular shape,…

  • Yuma Anomaly

    I received an email message the other day from a first-time reader. He happened to stumble across Twelve Mile Circle randomly through a search engine, hoping to learn the answer to a burning question. I’d never covered the topic on the site before so I didn’t have a ready answer. Nonetheless I found it both…