Tag: West Virginia

  • Big Ugly

    I’m working out the details for a short trip in March, a county counting adventure, although I haven’t determined all of the details yet and I’m not quite ready to share the objective. I’ll hit a personal milestone if everything works out as planned so I have plenty of motivation. Part of the drive will…

  • More Ancient Rivers

    The readers of Twelve Mile Circle seemed to anticipate where this conversation might head when I wrote about the advanced age of the French Broad River recently. I’d actually intended to write a single article about really old rivers. Then I had to split it when it got too wordy. Naturally I’d seen that same…

  • Flat as a Pancake

    The expression “Flat as a Pancake” obviously means something considered extremely flat. There are several U.S. states, led by Florida, that are indeed even flatter than a pancake. That’s not what this article is about. Rather I found a location that may or may not have been flatter than a pancake. Nonetheless it should be…

  • Bluefield on the Border

    When I was asked to chauffeur a runner to a half-marathon with a course that crossed between the conjoined cities of Bluefield on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, how could I say no? A long weekend of fall foliage and geo-oddities? I felt like I was dropped into an episode of Weekend Roady.…

  • Delphia

    The start for this research came from a recent tragic incident, a drowning at Triadelphia Reservoir in Maryland. My sympathies extend to the young victim’s family and friends of course. Afterwards I began to wonder how the reservoir got its unusual name. How did a triad (a group of three) apply to “Delphia.” The most…

  • Not the Usual State Capital Trivia

    It was time to clear my list of unwritten articles again. While doing that I noticed several of them involved state capitals, or their capitol buildings. Well, I’m not sure what the “usual” State Capital trivia might be much less the unusual. Nonetheless, let’s consider this an article on topics that the average layperson may…

  • Kentucky Adventure, Part 6 (And the Rest)

    All good things come to an end and before long our Kentucky adventure approached its natural conclusion. It was time to return home. I still had some parting opportunities as I left the state and then again as we steered through West Virginia towards the Mid Atlantic. East Wasn’t East Long ago in the early…

  • Public Street

    I run into various oddities as I prepare 12MC articles so I catalog them and pack them away for future exploration. This happened recently as I compiled International Capitals in the USA. I poked around a promising area in Brooksville, Florida and found something completely unexpected. A street called Public Street. This struck me as…

  • Slices of Belgium

    Immigration and the fingerprints it leaves behind sometimes finds its way to Twelve Mile Circle as a topic of conversation. The legacy remains even after a successful assimilation and disbursement of the original population. I’m curious particularly about the smallest populations of settlers in new lands — and it might be difficult to get more…

  • No, Not That One

    I was trying to find something on Buffalo, New York. I can’t remember what it was exactly, although that’s not actually important to the discussion. However, a random search led me to another Buffalo, a town with the same name in Wyoming. I considered it rather odd. When one thinks of Buffalo as a city,…