Tag: Road Trip

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 1 (The Premise)

    People following Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew something must be happening. Suddenly tweets tagged to places like Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau in Missouri began to appear on my feed just before Easter. I hadn’t announced the trip ahead of time although I’d been planning it for several weeks. I’ve been aiding and abetting…

  • Counting West Virginia, Day 1 (Let’s Begin)

    I don’t feature the most obvious geo-oddities of the United States anymore unless I plan to actually visit them in person. Perhaps a few longtime Twelve Mile Circle readers noticed the foreshadowing when I discussed the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia a few days ago. Maybe others saw photos I began to post on 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…

  • Riverboat Adventure, Part 6 (Signs)

    I thought I’d focus the final installment of the Riverboat Adventure on something a little more whimsical. Sometimes I have trouble remembering facts for a given place so I take photographs of informational signs. Usually this happens at historical sites. Sometimes signs provide greater explanation or context than what’s available on Internet pages. They serve…

  • DC Brewery Trail

    EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2013. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME. How does one justify a series of brewery visits within the subject matter of a geo-oddities blog? Good question. Author’s prerogative? Precedence? Ultimately I considered it a road trip; a very short and very specialized…

  • Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 1 (Getting There)

    It was a long time coming and I’d talked about it since last autumn. The Dust Bowl trip finally arrived. We flew to Denver, Colorado as our starting point. Certainly there were closer airports, however none of the others had non-stop flights or cheaper fares. I viewed it as an opportunity to capture some previously…

  • Shortest 48

    Today I’m fortunate enough to present a guest article from Jon Persky. Jon is a frequent contributor to the Twelve Mile Circle with a long history of insightful comments. He also inspired the popular Counting Border Crossings article a couple of years ago. In other words, Jon is an aficionado of geo-oddities of the highest…

  • My Craziest Geo-Oddity Adventure Ever

    The adventure will have ended by the time you read this. I’m writing this several days ahead of time since I will be returning home when my WordPress software automatically posts this. I suspect I’ll also be dog-tired. The Auction This whole crazy thing started almost exactly a year ago. Steve Wood, the author of…

  • Iron Butt Rally

    I’d had a vague notion of the premise behind the Iron Butt Association, a loose organization of people addicted to extremely long-distance motorcycle rides. But the basic membership, the absolutely easiest level, requires a documented ride of 1,000 miles (1,600 km) within 24 hours. They call it the SaddleSore 1000. Rides quickly increase in difficulty…

  • Goodbye Airlines

    We’re heading out on another epic road trip. This time we plan to cross the southeastern United States. That’s a distance of about a thousand miles (sixteen hundred kilometres), a good bit longer than even our drive to Maine last Summer. Our route takes us on a nice curve from the Mid-Atlantic down to the…