Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Water

  • 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…

  • Humble Mississippi

    Most everyone has an awareness of the Mississippi River no matter their cultural background or geographic familiarity. It would be like never hearing about the Amazon or the Nile. The Mississippi is one of the great rivers of the world and it drains a huge North American watershed. It’s a fixture. I’ve enjoyed this natural…

  • Bought the Town

    The article-generating loop continues with the recent Creative Marketing article leading directly into this one. It’s not quite a geo-oddity perpetual motion machine although that would certainly be an interesting thought. It’s hard enough to find meaningful topics without having to stitch them together end-to-end. So I think the coincidental associations will end here at…

  • A Most Improbable Shore

    I have a soft spot for low-brow culture. I’ve admitted that before and I’m not ashamed of my enjoyment of certain popular trends. One would think in consideration that I’d be a huge fan of the Reality Television genre. I’m not, and I don’t know why. By all rights I should be able to enjoy…

  • Batten Down the Hatches

    I’ve been familiar with the phrase “Batten Down the Hatches” for so long that I can’t even recall when I first heard it. I’ve always understood it to derive from a nautical origin. However, in current usage it seems to mean a more general effort to prepare for the worst. One would want to cover…

  • Gephyrophobia

    Gephyrophobia is a fear of bridges. People who experience this anxiety are gephyrophobiacs. I’ve known people with this fear to varying degrees although I didn’t realize it had an actual name until recently. I noticed a search engine query on Twelve Mile Circle from someone who appeared to be a gephyrophobiac. The person wanted to…

  • Chincoteague and Assateague

    The dirty little secret of the geo-oddities blogger community is that there’s only so much geographic weirdness to go around. We all tend to overlap with our material from time-to-time, and that’s fine. We each apply our own spin on a common set facts to develop something original and creative. I’d been trying to think…

  • Ferry from Maryland to Virginia

    It’s time to provide another Public Service Announcement. These are Twelve Mile Circle articles that answer burning questions from one-time visitors in the general public that may not appeal to the regular audience. I’ll talk about maps, transportation and a little about history that may interest a localized segment of readers. Feel free to continue…

  • Bridge Between Wisconsin and Michigan

    My favorite inspiration, random Internet queries falling from the sky onto the Twelve Mile Circle via search engines, struck again recently. This time our anonymous explorer wanted to find more information about a bridge from Wisconsin to Michigan. The natural reflex would be to pull out a map… … and say to oneself, a bridge…

  • New Sweden

    The New Sweden colony first made an appearance in Twelve Mile Circle a few weeks ago. Back then I spoke of an ancient trust, on Burlington Island in the Delaware River. Swedes don’t get much attention for their colonial history in North America. The narrative generally focuses upon English, Spanish and French interests. Sometimes Dutch…