It happened that the Mogollon inhabitants of Chaco Canyon were forced to leave their home by a prolonged drought. Their ancestors had been told by the spirits ‘at the time of emergence’ that a place had been prepared in which they would live. So the tribe left their lands in Chaco and wandered through the American Southwest, pausing from time to time to call out ‘Haak’u’, which means ‘a place prepared’.
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The San Francisco de Asis Church may be made of adobe like many others in the region, but its appearance is very different. Its thick walls with their jutting buttresses look more like a fortification than a place of worship, and its massive bulk seems completely out of proportion to the small community it was built to serve.
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What makes a place to stay special? Is it the location? The people? The building itself? Maybe in the best places it is all of these things, plus a small helping of ‘je ne sais quoi’.
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Top ten lists are somewhat invidious things. No sooner have you published one than you realise you have omitted something you should have included, or included something that on second thoughts might have been better omitted. So it is with some hesitation that I offer my top ten list of places we have stayed.
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Where better to take candid street photos than New York City? It is one of my favourite cities, and has a buzz unequalled anywhere else I have visited. It is like being on a movie set. The skyscrapers and streets provide the perfect backdrop for the constant ebb and flow of people.
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There is a solidity to this church; it seems rooted in the soil from which it was built. Its thick walls with their jutting buttresses look more like a fortification than a place of worship, and its massive bulk seems completely out of proportion to the small community it was built to serve.
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The Hoh rainforest is an ancient, almost enchanted place, green and mysterious. Some of its trees have stood here for over a thousand years, long before European explorers came to this continent. Draped with mosses and ferns they seem to stand outside time; a haven of stillness in an ever-shifting world.
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If you call a place ‘Paradise’ it had better be somewhere special! Luckily this area of Mount Rainier National Park really does live up to the name bestowed on it by Virinda Longmire in 1885. When she first saw this spot, carpeted with wildflowers, she is said to have exclaimed, ‘Oh, what a paradise!’
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It's impossible to imagine New York City without its skyscrapers, and it's equally impossible to imagine visiting the city without going up at least one of those skyscrapers to see the view from the top. The obvious choice might seem to be the Empire State Building but … maybe you should think again.
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On the vast plains of New Mexico, with their huge skies, and more cattle than people, it is not difficult to imagine a cowboy galloping over the nearest ridge. And wherever you go in this state, the ghosts of outlaws past will follow you, most notably Billy the Kid.
