Category: Event

  • New England, Part 6 (Roundup)

    I came home sooner than I would have wanted, the journey over, a feeling that always seemed to settle upon me after a trek through hidden rural corners. I decompressed and began to process a trove of memories, sharing many of them with the Twelve Mile Circle audience. But some of those didn’t fit neatly…

  • New England, Part 1 (Give me a Sign)

    I returned recently from another one of my hurried trips, this one to the New England states. All of them. Plus New York for good measure. Those of you who followed Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew that already. The rest of the 12MC audience may not have noticed anything at all. I wrote a…

  • Thanks a Million

    Longtime readers know that I check user statistics for Twelve Mile Circle daily. However, I don’t often examine figures that go all the way back to the earliest days of the blog. I did that recently, and to my surprise discovered that visitors had arrived from more than one million distinct sources since its inception.…

  • Mike

    Twelve Mile Circle highlighted Mundane First Name Places in the previous article. However, I left out the most prolific mundane name I’d discovered to date. That one, I really wanted to feature it in its own stand-alone spotlight. It didn’t make sense to combine it with all of the others because of its sheer popularity…

  • My Speech

    On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of presenting a speech about the Washington, DC Boundary Stones to the Stone Bridge Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Ashburn, Virginia. Since this was a group based in Northern Virginia, I placed a special emphasis on those markers on the Virginia side of the…

  • White House Christmas Tour

    Every once in awhile my proximity to the nation’s capital results in interesting opportunities. I got a chance to visit the White House somewhat by luck to see the 2015 Christmas decorations displayed for public viewing. This was the standard public tour — I’m no VIP just an average citizen — although it happened to…

  • Geography Ablaze

    Loyal reader Ken has attended Burning Man a number of times and suggested I highlight some of the geographic quirks associated with it. He was even kind enough to provide the topics! I’ve never experienced Burning Man so I was grateful to begin this article with a pre-packaged outline. All of the ideas below came…

  • Hays

    The Twelve Mile Circle “Complete Index Map” has enough entries on it now that my mind wandered to the spots not yet covered. These tended to be remote, empty places bereft of many people or dramatic topography. That would appear to be an accurate description of central Kansas in particular, seemingly flat as a pancake…

  • On the Steps

    I clicked through television channels aimlessly the other day, a boredom-induced activity of mine. Then I came across a famous a scene from one of the Rocky movies. The hero Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) started running up the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (map). You know the scene I’m talking about.…

  • Circleville Survived

    The squared circle wasn’t the only fascinating story hiding in Circleville, Ohio (map). The town survived and grew in spite of its early experiment with urban renewal. I’d wondered how a town so named could have escaped my attention for the last several years. In the meantime I’d felt a weird sense of déjà vu…