Tag: Michigan

  • Finish Ohio & More, Part 2 (Last Chances)

    Sure, collecting the remaining Ohio counties was a major goal but not the only goal of this particular trip. The Ohio portion focused on the drive up and the drive back. Michigan was the destination. We spent significantly more time, several days in fact, based in East Lansing near Michigan State University. So despite the…

  • Finish Ohio & More, Part 1 (Swipe Up)

    It’s been a work in progress. Slowly, ever slowly, I chipped away at Ohio counties as my older kid attended school in Michigan. I took a different route through Ohio multiple times, collecting counties and adding them to my list. So this was, I think, the sixth trip involving Ohio, all dutifully recorded on Twelve…

  • Borderland, Part 4 (Walpole Algonac Ferry)

    Our brief respite in Ontario approached its conclusion and we had to return to the United States. Three days earlier, we crossed the border using the Blue Water Bridge between Port Huron and Sarnia, which involved an hour-long wait. So this time we tried something different that had the added benefit of increasing my personal…

  • Lighthouse Adventures

    The 93 Lighthouses I have visited I noticed that I have visited quite a few lighthouse as a result of my journeys, and many have been featured in these travel pages since I began posting them a number of years ago. I didn’t start as a lighthouse collector, it just sort-of happened, but now I…

  • Borderland, Part 1  (Belle Isle)

    We flew up to Michigan for the older kid’s fall break from graduate school and we all wanted to see something new. This encompassed both sides of the international border between Michigan’s lower peninsula and the province of Ontario. Essentially this involved the borderlands along the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair…

  • Arc of Columbus, Part 1

    The summer flew by so quickly. It seems like only yesterday that I drove to Michigan to pick up the kid from college after the end of the spring semester. It was a great trip and I managed to collect eight previously unvisited counties in Ohio along the way. But now I was doing the…

  • Taming the Frontier, Part 2

    The drive up to Michigan was something I did for myself, and I visited a number of historical and cultural sites along the way. But I took the trip to drive a kid home for the summer and now I had a passenger for the rest of the ride. So I front-loaded most of the…

  • Graduated

    It seemed like just yesterday that Twelve Mile Circle chronicled the kid who designed an imaginary town and counted various forms of transportation. Now my elementary aged student is all grown up, a newly-minted university graduate. Those interceding years passed much more quickly than I could have possibly imagined. Michigan State University is huge (~50,000…

  • Mitten Accomplished

    I got a unique opportunity to visit counties in a corner of the Midwest I hadn’t touched much when my older kid decided to go to college in Michigan. But it didn’t offer a lot of time for my quest, just a four year window before graduation. Even so, I set what I thought was…

  • Mackinac’s Orbit, Part 11 (What’s Brewing?)

    Twelve Mile Circle readers don’t really care about my brewery visits. I get it. You won’t offend me if you skip this article or scroll through the pictures without reading anything. I really do this more for myself to create a record of my visits that extend beyond the simplicity of my list or my…