Tag: Road Trip

  • 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…

  • Finishing Pennsylvania, Part 1 (Planning)

    I wanted to go to Idaho this summer. Then COVID-19 happened and threw those plans into disarray. Airplanes seemed unsafe and I couldn’t tell when I might fly again. My last real trip happened in February when I went to Bermuda. Back then the pandemic seemed a million miles away, something taking place on the…

  • Inner Banks, Day 1

    I set my sights on a doughnut hole of unvisited counties in northeastern North Carolina.  I’d left them untouched until now.  No interstate highways passed through them.  The didn’t fall on a direct path coming home from the beach.  They simply sat there as empty white space on my County Counting map.  Seven of them,…

  • Jersey Shore, Part 1 (Huh?)

    My wife and I took a little road trip over the Spring Break week immediately proceeding Easter.  We sent the kids away to stay with their grandparents.  Unencumbered, we found a rare opportunity to choose pretty much any destination in the world we wanted to explore.  Friends seemed perplexed by our ultimate decision though.  We…

  • Cross-Country, Part 2 (Weatherford Art Thou?)

    A strange alignment revealed itself as I planned my cross-country trip. I used the same basic set of assumptions for each of the four potential routes. First I divided the total driving duration by five to come up with approximately equal days on the road. That would average about seven hours of driving each day…

  • Cross-Country, Part 1 (The Plot Thickens)

    Don’t get me wrong, I loved our trip to Australia and New Zealand last summer. I already want to return there and someday I will. However, my relentless need to count counties took a serious hit in 2018 as a direct result. My map barely changed as the year progressed. I gave up on the…

  • Rockies Loop, Part 1 (Route)

    I took something of a stealth trip. Normally I’d announce my upcoming adventure to the Twelve Mile Circle crowd well in advance and ask for suggestions. This time I just went out on my own. I knew what I wanted to do. In fact, only subscribers of the 12MC Twitter learned about it, watching the…

  • Finishing West Virginia, the Premise

    Sometimes events don’t unfold as one might hope. This weekend I planned to capture six remaining West Virginia counties that I’d not visited before. I figured April would be a safe time of year with beautiful springtime weather and minimal traffic. That dream will need to be deferred for a little while longer. The route…

  • 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…

  • Totally Eclipsed

    Can anyone stand one more eclipse story? I promise this one will be a little different than most. I drove a thousand miles for a 4-day weekend and, well… Mother Nature had different plans. Lots of loyal Twelve Mile Circle readers asked me if I planned to see the August 21, 2017, total eclipse of…