Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Miscellaneous

  • Sweet Home, uh, Oregon

    I’m still working out all of the details on my upcoming trip to Oregon and Washington later this summer. The path seems to be getting clearer to me as I fill in missing pieces. It appears I’m going to have to apologize in advance to my Portland readers. The route will likely skirt the city…

  • Residential Airparks

    I didn’t know at the time that the formal terms “residential airpark” and “fly-in community” existed. Still, I found it pretty cool that people could own an airplane, keep it in a garage attached to their homes, and roll it directly onto an active runway mere steps away. Actually I noticed the phenomenon a number…

  • Pinwheel

    [EDITOR’S NOTE: Pinwheel later became Findery, and then faded into social media obscurity]. Longtime 12MC Reader “Mark” invited me to participate in a private beta version of Pinwheel.com about a week ago. I’ve spent a little time each evening tinkering with it. That’s not enough time to take advantage of Pinwheel’s true potential, of course.…

  • Heterogram Place Names

    It’s not only geography that makes a place unique. It can also be an unusual array of letters forming its name, for example what I featured awhile ago on Place Name Palindromes. I traveled down a several-hours tangent recently in search of heterogram place names. Those are words where each letter of the alphabet appears…

  • Geographical Survey of 12MC

    The author of the Geographic Travels blog provided a survey of his personal geography in an article a few days ago. That sounded like a fun idea so I decided to use the same survey questions for a “Geographical Survey of 12MC.” Then I decided to add a few more questions and answers. Maybe others…

  • Would You Believe?

    Have you ever dropped into Google Street View and found terrain that just didn’t “look right,” and differed from your expectations? I think we all have stereotypical preconceptions of how a place is supposed to appear, especially if we’ve never fully explore the area in person. Below is the image that surprised me a few…

  • Western Surname

    I have a small disconnect with the Twelve Mile Circle audience. I’m not much of a puzzle fan, and yet, my articles with challenges embedded within them often create the greatest amount of reader interest, page views and comments. But I’m also not beyond giving people what they want even though I profess to write…

  • All Lined Up

    Sometimes I feel like researching a topic and presenting it in exacting detail with supporting maps and illustrations. Other times I simply gaze at a map and draw a few lines. Today it’s about the lines. There’s nothing intellectual here, it’s more of a game. What is the maximum number of states I can cross…

  • Gargantuan Garages

    Were is the world’s largest parking garage? I’m not sure why that came to mind, as if I can ever figure out why I fixate on such oddities. It’s a tougher question than I imagined. I wanted to ponder this from the perspective of a single stand-alone structure. Lots of the sources I consulted happened…

  • Reflecting on 2011

    I’m progressing better than I expected with my off-season website maintenance plan. It has provided an unexpected opportunity to hammer-out one final post in 2011. I’ve decided to use the downtime to reflect on accomplishments on Twelve Mile Circle during the last year. I posted 156 articles over the year — generally three per week…