The Nevada ghost town of Rhyolite was once very grand, but was very short-lived. The mine got into financial difficulties in 1910, five years after opening, and closed the following year. With no work in the area the population of Rhyolite declined rapidly, to below 1,000 immediately after the mine’s closure and close to zero by 1920.
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The Periodic Table tells us that our world is made up of 118 elements. But the elements of nature are different from chemical elements. They were used to simplify the complexity of nature and matter by ancient people.
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When I travel of course I take plenty of photos of the ‘big’ things I see. The landscapes, the city sights, the famous buildings and monuments, the wildlife, interesting people … The list is, if not endless, at least pretty long. But I’m also on the lookout for quirky details. The sort of thing that would never make it into a guidebook and which I come across by chance.
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Where do the seeds of an idea for a trip start? Maybe in a book or TV programme or a fellow blogger’s post? Maybe a friend comes back from a holiday full of enthusiasm for the place(s) visited? Or maybe you have memories of a place you loved and want to return to, having left so much of it as yet unexplored? For us California was such a place.
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Halloween today is largely a commercial festival, and a bit of fun for children, but it has dark origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain. At that time, people believed, the barrier between the living and the spirit world was thinnest. Maybe that’s why we choose as fun decorations at this time of year things that would terrify us at any other time.
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We finished our recent California road trip with a couple of nights in Las Vegas, a city which like New York can claim to ‘never sleep'. I was reminded of this song because we stayed in the New York New York hotel and casino.
