Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Water

  • Carolina Wetlands, Part 1 (Padding the Count)

    Hopefully this will be the last set of articles where I ever have to mention the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe this will all seem quaint five or ten years from now when someone stumbles across this page. For now though it continues to shape how I travel and where I go. Even so, life goes on…

  • Grand Case

    Island of Saint-Martin / Sint Maarten (March 2011) We used the town of Grand Case on the French side of the island as our base while exploring St. Martin. We selected Grand Case for reasons that appealed to us. We’re not much into crowds, resorts, casinos or all-night festivities which tended to rule-out the Dutch…

  • Select Beaches in Saint-Martin

    Island of Saint-Martin / Sint Maarten (March 2011) There are more than twenty beaches on the island of St. Martin / Maarten, a space only a little larger than thirty square miles. Naturally that offers plenty of options. I’m not really a beach person and we remained almost entirely on the French side of the…

  • Wintertime in Corolla, Part 1 (Water)

    My travel took a beating in 2020. Little did I know. Little did any of us know. True, I did manage a proper vacation to Bermuda just before the pandemic struck. Then we hid for brief periods away from everyone else at lakes in Pennsylvania and in Michigan. That helped. Hopefully someone reading this page…

  • Angra do Heroísmo Harbor

    Terceira, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) We drove west along Terceira’s southern coastal road. The scenery became increasingly impressive all along the way. Finally we turned a corner and noticed a spit of land jutting outward from the island across the pastoral landscape. This marked Monte Brasil, the volcanic caldera at Angra do Heroísmo…

  • Porto Martins

    Terceira, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) Porto Martins lies due south of Praia do Vitória along Terceira’s eastern shore (map). It is a scenic fishing village and summer resorts with a popular natural swimming pool at the waterline. We stopped where land met water. This was the location of the swimming hole set among…

  • Miscellaneous Scenery of São Miguel

    São Miguel, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) This page focuses on miscellaneous scenery throughout São Miguel. We took lots of photographs as we drove throughout the central and eastern portions of the island. However there weren’t enough photos to justify an individual page for each of the locations shown below. Caloura The picturesque town…

  • Furnas Scenery

    São Miguel, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) Furnas is a Portuguese word that is similar to its English cognate “Furnace.” In this case it applies to a town and a region in a broad interior valley on the eastern side of São Miguel. Furnas rests in a caldera basin surrounded by mountains on all…

  • Ponta Delgada Scenes

    São Miguel, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) Ponta Delgada is the capital of the Azores and its most populous city. It hugs São Miguel’s southwestern coast (map). These old “City Gates” or Portas da Cidade probably personifies Ponta Delgada more than any other image. They dated back to the 18th Century. Back then the…

  • Whaling Industry Museum

    Pico, The Azores (Açores), Portugal (March 2001) The last whaling factory in the Azores operated at São Roque do Pico, from the cais (dock) along the waterfront. Whalers killed and harvested their prey in local waters. Then they delivered carcasses to the dock, where workers extracted oil and processed flesh and teeth. During its heyday,…