Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Event

  • Hairy Man

    I don’t know why I started wondering about Bigfoot this morning. Yes, the actual Bigfoot, as in Sasquatch the large mysterious cryptid hominid of North America’s Pacific Northwest region. I don’t put much faith in the whole Bigfoot phenomenon because I think one would have been discovered by now if it existed, making it all…

  • World’s Fair Towers

    I suppose this is something of a Part 3 addendum to the recent Southern Swing articles although maybe it’s not truly the case. Perhaps it would be better to call it “inspired” by those earlier articles. We broke the return trip into a two-day event with an overnight stay in Knoxville, Tennessee. The hotel happened…

  • 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.…

  • Wyoming, More Than Just a State

    A visitor arrived on Twelve Mile Circle the other day from Wyoming, Iowa. Certainly I was acutely aware of the State of Wyoming as well as the predecessor Wyoming in Pennsylvania. However, the Iowa rendition was a new one for me. So I conducted a quick frequency check of “populated places” designated Wyoming in the…

  • Circling Back

    “Circling Back” would be the best title for this article. It implies a revisiting or rethinking of previous ideas with a connection back to Twelve Mile CIRCLE. It’s appropriate. Also it sounded a lot better than “barely warmed-up leftovers” which is what it really is. Savor I reached back to a trio of articles for…

  • Odds and Ends 11

    The day I dreaded finally arrived. I was defaulted to the new version of Google Maps yesterday. I wasn’t favorably impressed when I first reviewed it last May. Also, I always understood that the version I’ve used since the creation of Twelve Mile Circle would go away eventually. Sooner-or-later I was going to have to…

  • Black Gold

    I noticed an interesting road at the Oklahoma State Fair Park called Black Gold Drive. I thought it was interesting how they’d intertwined their state history into the fairgrounds. Black Gold of course represents a natural resource found abundantly within the state. Other avenues there included Land Rush Street and the less-than-politically-correct Red Mans Path.…

  • Bowls

    All that talk of bowling greens in the previous article increased my curiosity about the sport of bowls (or lawn bowls) in general. It’s similar to a family of Continental lawn bowling games including Bocce and Pétanque. Essentially, it spread wherever the British Empire extended. I’m not sure why I didn’t discover Bowls a couple…

  • From Camp to Town

    When I mentioned The Bloodshot Eye recently I hadn’t realized that I’d stumbled upon a “thing”. I’d encountered a long history of annual Camp Meetings held by the Methodist Church. Back then I featured the unusual circle-and-spokes streets of Pitman Grove, New Jersey (map). Of course that included the tiny Victorian-era cottages that lined them.…

  • Menacing Island

    I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…