Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Weather

  • Eric Henn Murals

    A couple of articles featured Circleville, Ohio earlier this year, Square the Circle and Circleville Survived. I’d honed in on this otherwise nondescript town because anything with a circle was fair game for Twelve Mile Circle. And I actually discovered a few fascinating tidbits, confirming once again that geo-oddities existed everywhere. One such item included…

  • Traveling’s Greatest Hits

    It occurred to me, as I wrote two recent travelogues, that I’d visited a lot of interesting places in the last few years. I recorded my thoughts and impressions from those journeys on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle. The intent was to describe my adventures while still fresh in my mind. Looking back through…

  • Islands and Cape, Part 3 (Lighthouse Crazy)

    Longtime readers of Twelve Mile Circle already know that I have a thing for lighthouses among numerous other counting-related quirks. I might have gone overboard on the recent trip to Cape Cod, however. That wasn’t my intent. It seemed as if lighthouses appeared every time I turned around, and the next thing I knew I’d…

  • Islands and Cape, Part 1 (Seacoast Scenes)

    It seemed like I was on the road just yesterday and here I was back out in the wilds once again. This time my wife and I were celebrating a round-numbered wedding anniversary so we headed up to coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I’d been to Boston many times before, however I’d never traveled along…

  • Great Allegheny Passage, Day 1 (Pittsburgh to West Newton)

    I fretted about my upcoming bicycle trek along the Great Allegheny Passage trail. My attitude got stuck somewhere between nervousness and fear. I’d never attempted anything like it before, a 150 mile (240 kilometre) rails-to-trails ride between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. Confronting My Fears Every time I conquered a fear I created a new…

  • Undignified Floods

    Floods are awful in any form and I don’t wish to diminish or make light of that one overriding consideration. However there are floods of a “normal” variety — if an event so awful can be referred to so cavalierly — and then there are the truly bizarre. Either way, it leaves behind lost lives,…

  • Going Postal, Part 1

    I alluded to postal ZIP codes in the recent Zip Lines and I’ll carry that theme through the next couple of articles. I’d stumbled upon the United States Postal Service’s Fun Facts. Someday maybe I’ll explore what exactly makes a fact “fun” although for now I think I’ll simply steal liberally from that page and…

  • 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.…

  • Hardly Tropic

    Technically, the tropics would be an area hugging the equator between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, between approximately 23°26′-or-so north and south. The two latitudes marked the extent the sun might appear directly overhead if only briefly on a single day, the summer solstice. Tropics also had a more widespread definition…

  • Ireland, Part 4 (On the Water)

    I enjoy boat rides. Ireland is surrounded by water. Is it surprising that I found myself cruising over the waves? No of course not. However, I didn’t expect it to happen four times during my trip even if a couple of those were fleeting encounters. Skellig Michael Skellig Michael ranked high on my list of…