Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Highest Numbered Street

    Newer cities created on grid patterns often used street naming systems based on numbers. The closest street to an important urban feature became 1st Street. Numbers increased from there. Distinct patterns emerged in different cities, of course. Maybe numbered streets increased outward in two directions, north and south or east and west. Plenty of other…

  • Make Tracks Through Blair

    Our first day in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania went so well that I wondered how I would top it. Its neighbor, Blair County gave it a good run for the money though. I came up with a really good one-day itinerary too, all aligned with a railroad theme. On top of that it followed a leisurely…

  • Autumn in Huntingdon

    I completed the little adventure I described in County Hunter a few days ago. The first leg involved a track through previously unvisited Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Don’t confuse this with Huntington (with a T) elsewhere in Pennsylvania, a township in Adams County near Gettysburg. I kept messing up searches because my mind wanted to spell…

  • County Hunter

    The itch to continuously visit new counties kept stalking me. I did really well this year with a long road trip back from Missouri in April. Then I drove all over the Midwest in June. Finally I took the whole family through the Four Corners region of New Mexico and Colorado. My county counting tally…

  • Body Parts

    The more I thought about it, apparently body parts influenced an awful lot of geographic names. It seemed natural though. People liked to name things after familiar objects. What could be more familiar than the flesh right there in front of them? From head to feet and practically everywhere in between, I found spots on…

  • Big Time

    Quite awhile ago, Twelve Mile Circle looked at some Remarkable Sundials. I found some rather amazing timepieces in a lot of different places, some of them quite large. Now I wondered about the largest actual clock with a face and hands. I didn’t know why the notion suddenly came to me after the passage of…

  • What the Hill

    My wife keeps signing me up for running races. I guess she wants some company during her crazy pursuits. It seems harmless enough so I join her even if I’d rather be doing something less competitive. Those are the kinds of compromises one makes to keep peace in the house, and we’ve been together a…

  • Fire

    It seemed like wildfires burned all across the American West this summer, each one worse than the other. A fire in Montana burned so long and so intensely that many nearby towns experience perpetual nightfall for days. Amazingly, the fires of 2017 stripped an area as big as the state of Maryland. For the European…

  • Out of Season

    A strange sight confounded my older son as we walked through a warren of shops near the Santa Fe Plaza during our recent New Mexico trip. He spotted a year-round Christmas store. It didn’t register on my mind until he pointed it out, I guess because I’d seen plenty of them before. Although, as I…

  • Even More Spooky

    It served me right for trying to guess what might please the Twelve Mile Circle audience. Longtime readers know that I’ve never been able to do that in the past even after all these years of trying. I probably should have waited until closer to Halloween. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this series — the exact locations…

Latest Comments

  1. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  3. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  4. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…