I have no idea, but the Crater of Diamonds state park looks close enough for a day trip.
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That is such a cool picture.
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Yeah, they weren’t very pleased with that one last year. I think the 3 hours round trip was a factor.
They did love the Three Sisters springs
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It seemed like a really cool place the last time I went there. Lemme see…that was in 1976, so I was 7. Yeah, I can see how maybe my recollection might not be that accurate.
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It sounded pretty stripped out and there weren’t other children to befriend. They might try one of the crystal places. She might feel differently with her cousins to dig with. The ones with active mines dumping new hauls every so often.
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The discussion about Yugos over in the car thread briefly veered into travel to then Yugoslavia. Here’s my Yugoslavia travel story:
Mid-1980s. I was a high school exchange student in then West Germany. At the end of the school year there was a few weeks before my exchange year ended, so I went with my host family and some of their friends on vacation to the Chalkidiki Peninsula in northern Greece, three families driving together convoy-style from Rheinland-Pfalz through Austria to Ljubljana to catch the overnight car train to Skopje, then driving on to Greece. We crossed the border from Austria into Yugoslavia at a tiny little border crossing, maybe two guys in a mountain hut with an actual crossbar over the road. It looked like a movie set. They had no idea what to do with my USA passport, don’t think they had ever seen one before. They conferred for a few minutes, shrugged, and stamped something into it. Easy peasy, right?
Well, no. On the way back, crossing from Greece into Yugoslavia at the BIG border crossing along the main highway with many lanes of traffic things got interesting. The Yugoslavian border officer took our group’s stack of passports, saw mine, and immediately waved our car out of line. He spoke a very little broken German, so the best we could figure out was that I couldn’t enter Yugoslavia without a visa and my transit two weeks earlier had been illegal. He called his supervisor over, and a large angry man in a fancier uniform stomped out of the air-conditioned office building across the many lanes of border traffic and proceeded to yell at all of us in Serbian? Macedonian? as he waved my passport at my host dad. Then he turned on his heel and marched off WITH MY PASSPORT back toward the office building. My 17-year-old self watched my passport disappearing, then ran after him, dodging cars and getting yelled at by drivers and my host family.
I was allowed into the waiting room but couldn’t communicate to the desk clerk why I was there. In retrospect it was of course completely obvious why I was there, since Angry Supervisor had come in and I could hear him yelling behind the partition wall through the clerk’s transaction window, but at the time I wasn’t thinking very calmly. (Also, I was 17.) Just as my host dad came in, Angry Supervisor came up to the window with my passport and proceeded to angrily stamp several pages of the correct transit visa for a USAian into my passport, almost threw it at me, and angrily waved me out of the waiting room with big angry “shooing” motions. Host dad tried to ask about visa fees, but the clerk waved us off too (amused, not angry), so we said a bunch of Dankeschöns and zipped out of there back to the car and back on the road to Skopje to catch the car train headed north.
So that’s how I transited Yugoslavia, once illegally and once not.
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Wow. I don’t have any fun stories like that. The closest I have is when my friends insisted that we saw Michael Schumacher pass us on the highway between Ventimiglia and Nice because he had a very special custom Ferrari. It did sound amazing through the tunnel.
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I’m thinking of visiting San Miguel de Allende in Mexico.
Anyone have thoughts? And safety info for queer people?
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Mine would be regarding the ferry from Algeciras, Spain to Tangier, Morocco. There was a guy sitting at a table near (not at) the gangway, trying out a new Palm Pilot (or whatever was new & cool 22 years ago) with a couple of other people. Now & then someone would walk up and hand the guy their passport. It wasn’t clear why anyone was doing this, nor whether the guy was acting in any official capacity (he wasn’t wearing a uniform), nor was there any signage indicating that we needed to go visit this person*. In the absence of the latter, we figured we might as well do nothing & enjoy the trip. After a while they caught up with us, and yes that’s how & where we should’ve obtained our entry visas, and they were really annoyed & flabbergasted that we hadn’t figured this out for ourselves.
*As opposed to, say, a uniformed officer of the state, standing in a glass booth at the point of disembarkation
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Maritime passport control is WAY more relaxed and yet just as strict as land or air. Show up to a foreign port and there’s nothing to stop you from docking and disembarking. But if you skip checking in they get really upset for some reason…
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Staying in Brooklyn this weekend. We’ll be there Saturday afternoon/evening through Monday mid-day.
I’ll be on the hunt for some waterproof ink for a fountain pen, but otherwise no shopping needs.
Any tips for fun things to look at? Good graffiti/street art/public art areas to walk around?
I’m not interested in attending any indoor events like concerts or theater.
I do like to eat.
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You could spend the entire weekend just exploring Prospect Park!
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Green-Wood Cemetery is interesting if you’re in the area. Brooklyn is huge. The Brooklyn Museum is top-notch; be sure to check out The Dinner Party if you go there. It’s right by Prospect Park.
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I’m convinced that if we start the first manned mission to Mars, we will find one of those stickers there. At least I’ve never been anywhere on earth where there wasn’t one.
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“I hate this part of Texas”.
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I’m convinced that if we start the first manned mission to Mars, we will find one of those ducks there. At least I’ve never been anywhere on earth where there wasn’t one.
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If you are in London DO NOT go to any US candy shops
During the raid, two shop assistants ran off and disappeared via a hidden panel in the basement wall which led to a secret room of suspected illegal goods and an escape exit on to the street
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