Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Michigan

  • Michigan, Part 2 (Breweries)

    Most people seemed confused whenever I mentioned Grand Rapids, Michigan as our vacation destination this year. They could understand a holiday at the seashore or in the mountains or traveling abroad. A mid-sized Midwestern city specializing in consumer manufacturing seemed considerably less intuitive to them. Then I revealed the true reason: its great concentration of…

  • 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…

  • Another Last Stand

    John Wilkes Booth‘s last stand was by no means the only infamous last stand. It got me thinking about a wide range of other events from the last couple of hundred years that might fall within the same general guidelines. Last stands happened in many places in many times. I selected a few from the…

  • 2016 Travel Plans

    A new year dawned on Twelve Mile Circle as I turned my eye towards another batch of travel adventures. Plans began to fall into place. They won’t approach the stratospheric heights of a very ambitious 2015 travel season although they’ll still be substantive from my perspective. As always, I like to post my general plans…

  • Highpoint to Lowpoint

    Twelve Mile Circle received an intriguing question from reader “Cary” a few days ago. Cary, a professional mapmaker, noticed something interesting while conducting research: the amazing proximity of Minnesota’s highest point of elevation to its lowest. This led to a natural question. Was this the shortest distance between a state highpoint and a lowpoint? I’d…

  • Fighting Words

    If someone named a town “Battle” then I would expect that it might commemorate a great conflict taking place nearby. I believed most logical people would find that a reasonable conclusion. So I examined several occurrences and discovered that it wasn’t necessarily the case. Usually the battles referenced were rather inconsequential or not even battles…

  • Going Postal, Part 2

    As I mentioned in Part 1, the first installment dealt with physical post offices and this one will focus on methods of postal delivery. Both featured examples drawn primarily from the United States Postal Service’s “fun facts” page. Mule Pack animals would seem to be an antiquated method of mail delivery. Certainly horses, mules or…

  • Not the Usual State Capital Trivia

    It was time to clear my list of unwritten articles again. While doing that I noticed several of them involved state capitals, or their capitol buildings. Well, I’m not sure what the “usual” State Capital trivia might be much less the unusual. Nonetheless, let’s consider this an article on topics that the average layperson may…

  • Sault

    Twelve Mile Circle mentioned Sault Ste. Marie the other day, the name of two cities on opposite banks of the St. Marys River, one in Canada and the other in the United States. The curious prefix “sault” jumped-out of course, and while I was aware that it should be pronounced something akin to “soo” I’d…