Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 3 (Cultural Threads)

    Appalachia described more than a physical geography. It described a proudly self-reliant people who’d lived within these hills and hollows on their own wits for more than two centuries. I mentioned some of my perceptions after I visited Kentucky in 2013. It would be all to easy to reduce Appalachia to unfair hillbilly stereotypes. Naturally…

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 2 (Vistas)

    Notions of endless horizons came to mind as I prepared for an Appalachian Loop. We would cross mountaintops, dip into hollows and follow valley flatlands along tumbling rivers amid early signs of spring. This journey promised stunning scenery in a little-visited and often under-appreciated rural preserve. People who ventured into Appalachia as tourists usually came…

  • Appalachian Loop, Part 1 (The Quest)

    It began with a simple premise. Finish Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia was a particularly difficult journey for County Counters due to its odd configuration of 95 counties and 38 independent cities. It also happened to be my home state. I’d long been irritated that I still hadn’t completed it. I’d chipped away at the…

  • Odds and Ends 12

    It’s been quite awhile since I posted one of the recurring Odds and Ends articles. I had a bunch of small items to share, so why not? People seemed to like them. I considered that #12 must have been special because it was twelfth in line and Twelve Mile Circle liked to celebrate all things…

  • Making Guinea Bissau

    I dug a little deeper into the visitor logs after I finished celebrating Twelve Mile Circle’s millionth visitor. Years ago I used to highlight the initial visitor from each nation. However, I stopped that after I’d attracted people to the site from just about everywhere. Nonetheless, there were a few stubborn holdouts and the logs…

  • Thanks a Million

    Longtime readers know that I check user statistics for Twelve Mile Circle daily. However, I don’t often examine figures that go all the way back to the earliest days of the blog. I did that recently, and to my surprise discovered that visitors had arrived from more than one million distinct sources since its inception.…

  • Capitol: Behind the Scenes Tour

    I’ve lived in the Washington, DC area my entire life and it’s not very often that I get to see something in the city completely new. On Saturday the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon series made its annual stop in town. As part of that it offered a private tour of the Capitol building as a…

  • Naming All Those Lakes

    I mentioned finding lakes named Tin Can Mike and Hungry Jack in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area (BWCAW), when I posted the article called simply Mike. There were limitless lakes within that wilderness, so many that people naming them had to revert to linguistic gyrations to separate one from another. I’ll get to…

  • Mike

    Twelve Mile Circle highlighted Mundane First Name Places in the previous article. However, I left out the most prolific mundane name I’d discovered to date. That one, I really wanted to feature it in its own stand-alone spotlight. It didn’t make sense to combine it with all of the others because of its sheer popularity…

  • Mundane First Name Places

    Twelve Mile Circle received a visit from someone in Susanville, California (map) last week, landing right on the front page of the site. What an odd name for a town, I figured. It had to have a story. Who was Susan and why did she have a town named for her? Couldn’t the town founders…

Latest Comments

  1. That was its original range before people spread it all around. Now it’s in lots of different places, including Oklahoma.

  2. I think that range needs to be expanded greatly. I’m in the Oklahoma City area and those are fairly prevalent…

  3. The law in the 1800s when most of the countries was being broke down into smaller one stated that you…

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