Category: Water

  • Kenai Adventure, Part 3 – Wildlife

    Most people probably drive down to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula for the scenery and the wildlife, and that’s also true for me. Sure, I enjoyed poking around some of the more unusual aspects of Kenai geography but that doesn’t mean I haven’t taken advantage of opportunities to marvel at the natural beauty that attracts every other…

  • Kenai Adventure, Part 2

    Whittier is a scenic town of perhaps two hundred people on the western side of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. There are dozens of picturesque villages dotting the coastline of the Kenai Peninsula so that’s not why I stopped here on a cold, rainy morning in July. No, I wanted to experience its rich concentration of…

  • Kenai Adventure, Part 1

    I resolved my Internet dilemma. A park set aside for recreational vehicles sits just downhill from us although out of our line of site. Apparently there’s a company that specializes in providing Internet access to RV parks, allowing visitors to rent by the day, week or month. I’m close enough to tap into that so…

  • 100th Meridian Initiative

    The meridian line 100° west of Greenwich, England, often called simply the 100th Meridian, divides roughly the eastern side of North America from the west. This happens both geographically and culturally. So it cuts directly through the Great Plains in the United States. It goes down the middle of North and South Dakota, through Nebraska,…

  • Flipping Lat/Long Directions

    I was looking at the Latitude / Longitude coordinates of my residence a few days ago and I decided to keep the same coordinates but switch between North and South, East and West. An easy way to do this is to drop the coordinates in Google Maps and then change between positives and negatives. So…

  • Twelve Mile Mormons

    I get a lot of search engine queries that include the phrase, “Twelve Mile” within them. Really, that’s not so odd. One should expect that with a blog called Twelve Mile Circle. The number of places designated Twelve Mile something-or-another that turn up in these queries amazes me. Sometimes I even feature them on these…

  • Border Pirates

    I’d always thought of piracy as a 17th Century anachronism. Then things got weird off the coast of Somalia a few years ago. Even so I considered it a distant condition borne of a failed state two oceans away. Recent reports of North American pirates have simply bewildered me. I never imagined it existed outside…

  • Canada’s International Border(s)

    So a burning question keeps coming up on the site. “What is Canada’s only international border?” Single-time visitors of Twelve Mile Circle seem acutely interested in Canada’s international borders. My web logs register variations of this Search Engine query probably daily. Sometimes this comes up — I think — as a trick question on trivia…

  • Further Adventures Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast

    We’ve continued our journey along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, relaxing for the most part and visiting with family, but also taking time to explore a little further. Biloxi Lighthouse We stopped at Biloxi this morning. Most people come here for the casinos but that’s not my thing. I’d heard that the Biloxi Lighthouse had reopened less…

  • Lake Pontchartrain Circuit

    We continue to tour along the Gulf. This included a couple of day trips into Louisiana from our base on the Mississippi Coast. I’ve developed from those odysseys what I think is a great itinerary for any beer-loving aficionado of geographic oddities who needs to entertain the kids. I’ll admit that it’s a very small…