Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Capitol: Behind the Scenes Tour

    I’ve lived in the Washington, DC area my entire life and it’s not very often that I get to see something in the city completely new. On Saturday the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon series made its annual stop in town. As part of that it offered a private tour of the Capitol building as a…

  • Naming All Those Lakes

    I mentioned finding lakes named Tin Can Mike and Hungry Jack in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area (BWCAW), when I posted the article called simply Mike. There were limitless lakes within that wilderness, so many that people naming them had to revert to linguistic gyrations to separate one from another. I’ll get to…

  • Mike

    Twelve Mile Circle highlighted Mundane First Name Places in the previous article. However, I left out the most prolific mundane name I’d discovered to date. That one, I really wanted to feature it in its own stand-alone spotlight. It didn’t make sense to combine it with all of the others because of its sheer popularity…

  • Mundane First Name Places

    Twelve Mile Circle received a visit from someone in Susanville, California (map) last week, landing right on the front page of the site. What an odd name for a town, I figured. It had to have a story. Who was Susan and why did she have a town named for her? Couldn’t the town founders…

  • My Speech

    On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of presenting a speech about the Washington, DC Boundary Stones to the Stone Bridge Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Ashburn, Virginia. Since this was a group based in Northern Virginia, I placed a special emphasis on those markers on the Virginia side of the…

  • Sawtooth Elsewhere

    A sawtooth may not exist in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, I found plenty of others sawtooths (sawteeth?) elsewhere throughout the English-speaking world. That provided a wonderful opportunity to continue on a theme. Additionally it offered a chance to choose advantageous locations. By that I meant I decided to fill empty spots on the Complete Index map…

  • Sawtooth, Rhode Island

    Twelve Mile Circle received a handful of mysterious search queries focusing on the word “sawtooth” recently. One specifically referenced a location called Sawtooth Point, Rhode Island. I assumed they all derived from a common origin. Coincidentally or not, they landed on the same day from the same metropolitan area. One shouldn’t get too alarmed. Usage…

  • Minor League

    Twelve Mile Circle examined piles of sports teams while researching Other State Nickname Thingies. Generally I stuck with university teams although professional basketball’s Golden State Warriors became the best example. Of course I gazed at other sports too. Then I fell into the weirdness that could only be described as the names of minor league…

  • Other State Nickname Thingies

    Towards the end of 2015 I posted State Nickname Streets. As expected by the title, it offered a compendium of at least one street named in each state for its official nickname. I supposed it must have stuck in my subconscious because the notion returned. This time, however, I fixated on a several different sets…

  • 2016 Travel Plans

    A new year dawned on Twelve Mile Circle as I turned my eye towards another batch of travel adventures. Plans began to fall into place. They won’t approach the stratospheric heights of a very ambitious 2015 travel season although they’ll still be substantive from my perspective. As always, I like to post my general plans…

Latest Comments

  2. what is the total population that lives now in the land given back to Virginia should it be part of…

  5. Park ranger at Chalmette (New Orleans) Battlefield let me pull up the Union Jack 20 years ago. My dad would…