Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Miscellaneous

  • I Spy… the Street View Guy

    Thank you for indulging me while I turned 12MC into a travelogue for a couple of weeks and then took a brief hiatus after I returned. Your patience will be rewarded. I’m rejuvenated now, and it’s time for more geo-oddity goodness. I like looking behind the scenes, poking behind public façades. That’s why I was…

  • Who Loves 12MC in the United States?

    Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most in the United States? No surprise this time. It’s Washington, DC I examined the subset of 12MC visitors arriving on the website from the United States and compared it to state populations in order to derive per capita ratios. Yes, we all understand that the District…

  • Who Loves 12MC?

    Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most? Anguilla, apparently. I’ve tracked 12MC usage statistics for nearly five years, yet I hadn’t taken the next logical step by correlating this to per capita totals. Curiosity got the best of me and I created a simple spreadsheet comparing numbers of 12MC visitors by nations/dependent territories…

  • Sweet Home, uh, Oregon

    I’m still working out all of the details on my upcoming trip to Oregon and Washington later this summer. The path seems to be getting clearer to me as I fill in missing pieces. It appears I’m going to have to apologize in advance to my Portland readers. The route will likely skirt the city…

  • Residential Airparks

    I didn’t know at the time that the formal terms “residential airpark” and “fly-in community” existed. Still, I found it pretty cool that people could own an airplane, keep it in a garage attached to their homes, and roll it directly onto an active runway mere steps away. Actually I noticed the phenomenon a number…

  • Pinwheel

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: Pinwheel later became Findery, and then faded into social media obscurity]. Longtime 12MC Reader “Mark” invited me to participate in a private beta version of Pinwheel.com about a week ago. I’ve spent a little time each evening tinkering with it. That’s not enough time to take advantage of Pinwheel’s true potential, of course.…

  • Heterogram Place Names

    It’s not only geography that makes a place unique. It can also be an unusual array of letters forming its name, for example what I featured awhile ago on Place Name Palindromes. I traveled down a several-hours tangent recently in search of heterogram place names. Those are words where each letter of the alphabet appears…

  • Geographical Survey of 12MC

    The author of the Geographic Travels blog provided a survey of his personal geography in an article a few days ago. That sounded like a fun idea so I decided to use the same survey questions for a “Geographical Survey of 12MC.” Then I decided to add a few more questions and answers. Maybe others…

  • Would You Believe?

    Have you ever dropped into Google Street View and found terrain that just didn’t “look right,” and differed from your expectations? I think we all have stereotypical preconceptions of how a place is supposed to appear, especially if we’ve never fully explore the area in person. Below is the image that surprised me a few…

  • Western Surname

    I have a small disconnect with the Twelve Mile Circle audience. I’m not much of a puzzle fan, and yet, my articles with challenges embedded within them often create the greatest amount of reader interest, page views and comments. But I’m also not beyond giving people what they want even though I profess to write…