Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Initial Thoughts on the New Google Maps

    It’s like going to a fancy new restaurant with a months-long reservation list. You finally get through the portal, anticipating a remarkable culinary experience from a renowned celebrity chef. The waiter carries an enormous plate across the dining room, removes the cover from the dish with a flourish, and presents a tiny two-bite morsel plated…

  • Triple Letter

    An unwary visitor arriving on the Twelve Mile Circle through some random search once again provided fodder for an article topic. The query forwarded by search software said: “name of the county, state and cities starts with s?” Usually this means someone is trying to complete an online geography contest or perhaps an old-school crossword…

  • Shortline

    That’s shortline (with a “t”) not shoreline. The term describes very small railroads. I first became aware of shortlines a couple of years ago when we took a brief trip to Vermont during early Autumn. One of our activities included an excursion along the western bank of the Connecticut River. We took that trip on…

  • Surrounded in Time

    I noticed an anomaly when I researched Kansas Mountain Time for an article last January. Very little of Kansas remains in Mountain Time. Also, I suspect the entire state will flip eventually to Central Time. That hasn’t happened yet and the anomaly will remain in place until that occurs. A Three-Sided Occurrence Notice the far…

  • Canal Becomes Subway

    I wrote about Abandoned Canals in Canada several months ago. That then prompted a comment from loyal 12MC reader Bill Harris. He noted an unusual re-purposing of an abandoned canal across the border in the United States. Specifically he referenced a portion of the Erie Canal that originally flowed through downtown Rochester, NY (part of…

  • Hundred Dollar Hamburger

    Sometimes I wonder if I’m the last person to find out about things. A reader who identified himself as “Jasper” mentioned a $100 hamburger when I put out a call for southeastern Kentucky travel suggestions. I thought he was referring literally to a hundred dollar hamburger. Such a thing does indeed exist so I didn’t…

  • Africa’s Lowpoint

    I was poking around the CIA World Factbook (doesn’t everyone?) and came across an interesting page that listed “miscellaneous geographic information of significance not included elsewhere.” That’s wonderful, I thought, a page of international odds-and-ends that didn’t fit within the book’s prescribed format. Yes, I live for moments like that. It listed little tidbits on…

  • Make My Trip, Again

    Twelve Mile Circle picks a different state for its vacation each summer, and concentrates on an aspect of it intensely. Previous examples have included Alaska, Utah, and Oregon. The ultimate purpose of these holidays is to focus on unusual or oft-overlooked sites within the United States while sprinkling-in a few of the more famous sites…

  • (Mostly) Fictional Ferries

    I receive an inordinate amount of visitor traffic on my Ferry Maps of the World site. Very few of those hits come from 12MC readers. It’s basically a lot of one-and-done landings from people who never return to the website ever again. Google decided it didn’t like me about a year ago or I was…

  • Quad County Towns, Crowdsourced

    I knew I barely scratched the surface with Quad County Towns, a collection of municipalities that sprawled across the boundaries of four different counties. Examples were surprisingly difficult to find so I turned it over to the Twelve Mile Circle audience who quickly doubled my feeble efforts by appending comments. I hadn’t planned on writing…

Latest Comments

  2. Hi Mr. Howder — Just going from memory, I recall that your “rule” for counting a nation/state/county is “if I’m…

  5. Does anyone have actual music to the song – Tanaha ,Timpson. Bobo and Blair ?? It was recorded by Tex…