Category: Roads

  • Counting Border Crossings – Updated

    Several years ago, way back in November 2009, Twelve Mile Circle published an article called Counting Border Crossings. It revealed a new way to track travels suggested by loyal reader Jon Persky. Many people count nations, states, provinces, département, territories, counties or whatever. Jon’s method counted a place only when an adventurer traversed each border…

  • Noble Layers

    Washington State provided a nice example of presidential layering down to a county, a community and ultimately to a body of water. I couldn’t find any better example. However, I wondered whether I might be able to do something similar on a different tack. Many eastern states reflected another set of leaders, the noble men…

  • Where’s Waldo?

    I selected US Route 23 through Ohio as we drove back from Michigan. This would have been a long detour in normal circumstances. However I wanted to count a few new counties so I cut through a quiet slice of the state instead. So hours passed, boredom hovered nearby and I invented little non sequiturs…

  • Michigan, Part 6 (Parting Shots)

    I wrote several articles about my Michigan trip and I still had a pile of ideas I hadn’t touched yet. They didn’t fall into common themes so I lumped all those leftover scraps together to finish the series. I hope everyone enjoyed — or at least tolerated — my ramblings from the latest journey. We’ll…

  • Michigan, Part 5 (Do Overs)

    A Simple Observation I checked the Twelve Mile Circle dashboard this morning. The 1,276th article posted on Wednesday. I still cannot believe I came up with so many different topics. However, I do know that my writing evolved since that initial post on November 6, 2007. Early articles certainly contained few words. Now I delve…

  • Michigan, Part 1 (County Adventures)

    I selected Michigan for our summer holiday this year. I won’t pretend that the drive was fun or easy although depriving greedy airlines of revenue certainly enhanced the appeal. Well, I’ve described my distaste for airlines before and I reveled in the many hundreds of dollars I denied them with this trip and several others…

  • New England, Part 5 (Yes, More Bridges)

    Bridges? Not another article about bridges gasped a sizable portion of the Twelve Mile Circle audience. Yes, I decided to feature more bridges, all from my latest journey. This time I added a bit of a twist. The first two bridges were more interesting than usual. Then I segued back to my standard fare of…

  • New England, Part 4 (A Little History Too)

    New England, with some of the earliest colonies in a place that would later become the United States, harbored hundreds of years of history. The people there also appreciated those ties to the past. Most of my previous trips through the region hugged the coast. I relished an opportunity to wander inland to places less…

  • New England, Part 1 (Give me a Sign)

    I returned recently from another one of my hurried trips, this one to the New England states. All of them. Plus New York for good measure. Those of you who followed Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew that already. The rest of the 12MC audience may not have noticed anything at all. I wrote a…