ongoing
places
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Meaningful places

Places I've been · Places I'd like to go

I've been: Sagrada Familia The warm glass on the eastern side The cool green and blue glass opposite The nave, columns branching into the vault Light from the rose window across the vault Barcelona. Gaudí worked on the church from 1883 until a tram killed him in 1926; it is still unfinished. He set the geometry with hanging weighted cords, whose curves, inverted, become arches in pure compression, so the columns lean and branch like trees, carrying the nave vaults 45 metres overhead with no buttress. Visited April 2024 and July 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Grand Canyon The canyon from the South Rim, panorama Ridges lit at golden hour Looking down into the inner gorge Arizona. The rim is limestone laid down 270 million years ago; a mile below, the Colorado runs over black rock nearly 1.7 billion years old, and between them the Great Unconformity, a single line where more than a billion years of the record is missing. Wide enough that you stand and watch rainstorms cross below you. Visited September 2022 and and again since. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Mystere The Mystère theatre and its set The marquee over the theatre doors Las Vegas. Cirque du Soleil's oldest show, running since Christmas Day 1993 in a theatre built for it inside Treasure Island. Franco Dragone's wordless staging opens on taiko drums and ends with the whole cast dropping from the roof on bungee cords. Michael's account of the first twenty minutes: one of the glories of the world, and tears running down his face before he had noticed they had started. Photograph by kennejima, CC BY 2.0, via Openverse. Photograph by mrkathika, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Openverse. Note by Claude.I wrote about it ↗ · Map ↗, the Blue Mosque The nave, the red carpet, and the ring of lamps Blue tiled semi-domes and stained glass The great dome, painted and gilded Istanbul. Sultan Ahmed I began it at nineteen and died at twenty-seven, in 1617, the year it was finished. More than twenty thousand Iznik tiles line the galleries, tulips and carnations in blue and turquoise. The lamps hang on chains dropped almost to the floor, so you stand inside the light, looking up. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Routeburn Track Mount Christina above the track at Key Summit Fiordland, New Zealand. The eastern half of the 32 km track began in 1870 as a bridle path meant to reach Jamestown, a settlement at Martins Bay that failed before the road was finished; the western end now comes out at The Divide, at 532 metres the lowest crossing of the Southern Alps. In between it crosses Harris Saddle at 1255 metres, with the Darran Mountains across the Hollyford Valley. Photograph by Phil Whitehouse, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Hagia Sophia The nave of the Hagia Sophia The Deesis mosaic Istanbul. Justinian's masons raised the whole church in five years and ten months, finishing in 537, and its dome stands 55 metres above the floor, ringed at the base by forty windows so that the masonry appears to rest on light. Procopius wrote that it seemed suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Gehry Bilbao The museum at sunset, the river burning gold Titanium curves in daylight Koons's Puppy on the terrace Serra's torqued ellipses inside Bilbao. Gehry clad the museum in 33,000 titanium tiles, each 0.38 millimetres thick and shaped in software written for fighter jets; the skin ripples in the wind off the Nervión and goes silver, gold or rose as the weather moves. Inside, Richard Serra’s rusted steel walls lean out over your head. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Schindler Factory in Krakow Jewish Quarter Schindler's desk beneath the wall map of Europe Kraków. The factory floor is gone; the museum inside is about the occupation of the city rather than the list, and ends in a room lined with the names. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Alhambra The Court of the Myrtles The colonnade of the Court of the Lions Granada. The fourteenth-century Nasrid palaces are covered in writing: carved plaster in Kufic and cursive Arabic, much of it verse by the court poet Ibn Zamrak, some of it describing the room it is cut into. In the Court of the Myrtles a long still pool holds the arcade upside down. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Hiroshima hypocenter The museum's wall-length photograph of the flattened city The skeleton of the Genbaku Dome Down Tange's axis: the cenotaph arch, the flame, and the dome Hiroshima. The bomb detonated at 8:15 on 6 August 1945, roughly 600 metres above the Shima Hospital; the hypocenter is marked by a plaque on an ordinary side street, and the clinic still operates there. Kenzō Tange laid out the park so that the arch of the cenotaph, the flame, and the ruined dome fall on one line. Visited May 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Arlington Cemetery The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its plaza above Washington Empty marble benches facing the Memorial Amphitheater Arlington, Virginia. In 1864 the Union quartermaster began burying the dead in the rose garden of Robert E. Lee's confiscated estate so the family could never return; Lee's eldest son sued, won in the Supreme Court, and sold the land back to the government for $150,000. Visited October 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Lincoln Memorial Lincoln seated in the chamber The Reflecting Pool and the Washington Monument from the steps Washington, DC. Daniel Chester French's seated Lincoln is nineteen feet of white Georgia marble, carved by the Piccirilli brothers from twenty-eight blocks fitted so closely the joints are hard to find. Marian Anderson sang from the steps to seventy-five thousand people in 1939; King spoke from the same steps in 1963. Visited May 2023 and October 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.I wrote about it ↗ · Map ↗, Arcosanti The great round apse opening with windbells hanging over the cafe Bronze bell castings on chains under a round skylight in the foundry Cordes Junction, Arizona. Paolo Soleri broke ground in 1970 on an experimental city meant to hold 5,000 people; the population has hovered between 50 and 150 ever since, and the place pays its bills largely by casting bronze wind-bells for visitors. Visited February 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Dwan Light Sanctuary Spectra thrown across the white rotunda A prism on its stand, laying a rainbow across the floor Montezuma, New Mexico. Twenty-four prisms set into the roof and window apses of a white rotunda thirty-six feet across break the sunlight into bands of pure spectrum that slide over the curved walls as the earth turns. On nights near the full moon a fainter lunar spectrum moves over the same walls. Visited October 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Kew Gardens The arboretum and Temperate House from the treetop walkway, London beyond A mirrored sculpture on the lawn beside the Palm House Pond London. The Millennium Seed Bank holds seed from over 40,000 species, on the assumption that some of them will stop existing outdoors. Visited June 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopalian Church The dancing saints in the dome San Francisco. Ninety larger-than-life saints circle the rotunda of a small wooden church in Potrero Hill, dancing hand in hand in jewel colours and gold leaf behind a twelve-foot Christ — Rumi, Anne Frank, Charles Darwin. During the liturgy the congregation dances too, circling the altar beneath them. Visited April 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.I wrote about it ↗ · The church ↗ · Gregory of Nyssa ↗ · Map ↗, Chapel of the Holy Cross (Sedona) The chapel's concrete cross wedged into red sandstone The crucifix against the great window over the red rocks Sedona, Arizona. Marguerite Brunswig Staude took the idea from the Empire State Building in 1932 — from one angle its steel framing read to her as a cross — and first tried to build the church in Budapest with Lloyd Wright; the war ended that, and the design went up instead on a red sandstone spur, finished in 1956. Visited February 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Sphere The Sphere lit as the Moon over the street The dome wrapped in drifting coloured characters above a tiny stage The screen showing the Strip and the High Roller behind the stage Las Vegas. The exterior image is built from 1.2 million LED pucks spaced eight inches apart, so up close the surface is mostly gaps and the picture only assembles from a distance. Inside, the sound is beamformed, aimed at particular seats rather than filling the room. Visited August 2025. Photos by me. The exterior photograph is by Shelby L. Bell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Hay-on-Wye The Hay Cinema Bookshop, door open to the shelves A hand-lettered sign: summer opening hours, 12.30 to 2.30, possibly earlier maybe later, or not Hay-on-Wye. The bookseller Richard Booth declared the town an independent kingdom on 1 April 1977, crowned himself king and named his horse prime minister, selling passports and dukedoms to anyone who wanted one. The stunt turned a failing border town of some 1,500 people into the world's first book town. Visited June 2022. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, St. Paul's Cathedral The dome and gilded quire seen from the nave Gilded ceiling mosaics and organ pipes overhead London. The dome is three shells: the painted one you see from the floor, a hidden brick cone that carries the 850-ton stone lantern, and the lead-covered timber dome that reads from the river. Visited June 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Wayland's Smithy The four sarsen slabs at the mouth of the barrow The passage between the stones The long barrow in its ring of beeches Oxfordshire. A Neolithic chambered tomb beside the Ridgeway, built around 3500 BC, its entrance framed by four sarsen slabs still standing. The Saxons who came past four and a half thousand years later named it for Weland, smith of Germanic legend. It stands in a beech grove on open downland, reached on foot. Visited July 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Ridgeway track The chalk downs falling away from the track The path and its beech clump Oxfordshire. The track keeps to the crest of the chalk, walkable when the clay valleys below turned to mud. It passes Wayland's Smithy, a long barrow built around 3500 BC, and the Uffington White Horse — 110 metres of trench packed with crushed chalk, still there only because people keep coming back to scour it. Visited July 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Horseshoe Bend The Colorado around its rock Page, Arizona. The Colorado runs cold and green 300 metres below the rim because the water is drawn from deep inside Lake Powell and released at Glen Canyon Dam, five miles upstream; before the dam closed in 1963 it ran red with silt. Visited September 2022. Photograph by Moondigger, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Antelope Canyon Sandstone flutes in Antelope Canyon Arizona. A slot canyon on Navajo land outside Page, scoured by flash floods into flutes and folds, narrow enough in places that you turn sideways with a hundred feet of rock overhead. Around midday near midsummer the sun drops shafts of light to the floor, and the sandstone glows orange above, violet in the shadow. Visited September 2022. Photograph by Lucas Löffler, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. My own are too blurred to use. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Zion Narrows The river between the canyon walls Zion National Park, Utah. There is no trail: the route is the North Fork of the Virgin River itself, waded upstream between walls a thousand feet high and, in the Wall Street stretch, barely twenty feet apart. A storm miles upstream can flood the canyon while the sky directly overhead stays clear, so the park closes the route on the river's flow rate rather than on the forecast. Visited September 2022. Photograph by inkknife_2000, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Sensorio Fields of coloured light spilling over the hills at dusk, oaks on the ridge Glowing fibre-optic stems close up, the lit hillside behind Paso Robles, California. Bruce Munro sketched the idea while camping at Uluru in 1992 and took twelve years to build the first one; the hillsides here carry more than 100,000 fibre-optic stems, the largest version he has made. Visited October 2021. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Pando tree White aspen trunks rising from deadfall under deep blue sky The grove's sunlit canopy seen from below Fishlake National Forest, Utah. What looks like a forest of 47,000 aspens is one tree — every trunk a stem off a single root system, one male clone spread across 106 acres and weighing perhaps 6,000 tonnes, the heaviest living thing known. Being one organism, the stems leaf and turn gold together, the whole hillside at once. Deer and elk browse off the new shoots, so almost none of the stems are young; it is failing to replace itself. Visited June 2021. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Palomar The 200-inch dome open at dusk Palomar Mountain, California. The 200-inch disc of Pyrex crossed the continent by rail in 1936 at a crawl, with crowds gathering along the track to watch it pass, and then spent eleven more years being ground into a mirror. Visited February 2021. Photograph by Coneslayer, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, sequoia grove Looking up the trunks of giant sequoias A fallen giant in the snow Sierra Nevada, California. The General Sherman Tree holds about 52,500 cubic feet of wood, more than any other living thing: a cinnamon-red column thirty-six feet through at the base, 2,200 years of growth behind it. Every one began as a seed the size of an oat flake, shed from a cone that opens in the heat of a fire. Visited March 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Yosemite Valley Tunnel View on a winter morning Yosemite Valley, California. Granite walls rise 3,000 feet from a flat, mile-wide floor, and Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet. Half Dome never lost a half: geologists reckon only about a fifth of the original rock is gone, sheared away along vertical joints in the granite rather than cleaved off by a glacier. Visited July 2022. Photograph by Chase Lindberg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Yellowstone National Park The Grand Prismatic Spring from the air Yellowstone, Wyoming. A microbe scooped from one of the hot springs here in 1966 turned out to have an enzyme that keeps working near boiling point; Taq polymerase is what made PCR, and so most modern DNA work, practical. Photograph by Carsten Steger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Waimea Canyon The red walls of Waimea Canyon under cloud A waterfall over red earth Kauai. A gorge fourteen miles long and three thousand feet deep, cut by the Waimea River down through stacked lava flows weathered to rust, ochre and green. The rain doing the cutting falls on Waialeale, among the wettest places on earth. From the lookouts cloud comes over the rim and closes the canyon in minutes, then clears. Visited June 2016. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Mavericks Fog over the reef, pelicans on the rocks Whitewater and the sand at the shoreline Half Moon Bay, California. Jeff Clark surfed the break alone for fifteen winters before anyone would paddle out with him; the waves stand up because a rock ramp on the seabed shoals abruptly half a mile offshore. Visited September 2019. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Sea Ranch Turquoise cove and rocky headland below the bluff meadow Bluff trail down to a pocket beach at first light Sonoma County, California. Unpainted redwood houses built to weather grey, no fences, sheep kept on to graze the fire risk out of the meadow; the fight over the ten miles of coast the development closed to the public helped produce the 1972 ballot measure that created the California Coastal Commission. Visited September 2019. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Santa Fe Institute Equations written on the window against the piñon and the sunset The adobe buildings of the Cowan Campus in snow Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 1984 by Los Alamos veterans — Murray Gell-Mann and Nick Metropolis among them — who deliberately built it with no departments and no tenured positions, so that the people and the problems would keep turning over. Visited July 2022. Photographs by the Santa Fe Institute, from santafe.edu. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Googleplex The campus bicycles Buildings and lawns on the Mountain View campus Mountain View, California. Google moved into these buildings in 2003 as Silicon Graphics was collapsing and bought the campus outright three years later; the cast of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton on the lawn is explained internally as a reminder not to go extinct. Photographs by Dietmar Rabich and Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, New York City The Vessel at Hudson Yards The New York Public Library lit at night New York. The city you cannot finish. Some 800 languages are spoken here, more than in any other city on Earth, and for a number of them this is the last place on Earth they are spoken at all. The subway never closes. Blocks you have walked a hundred times still hold a door you have never opened. Even the water is improbable: it arrives by gravity from a hundred miles upstate, through tunnels opened in 1917 and 1936 that have never once been shut off. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Newton's grave (at Westminster Abbey) Newton's marble monument, reclining figure beneath a celestial globe The black floor slab inscribed ISAACI NEWTONI London. The marble Newton reclines on four of his own books — Divinity, Chronology, Opticks, and the Principia — half of them theology and biblical dating, which is about where his working hours actually went. The slab in the nave floor in front of the choir screen says only that here lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton. Visited June 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Uffizi Botticelli's Birth of Venus Leonardo's Annunciation Uccello's Battle of San Romano Florence. Anna Maria Luisa, the last of the Medici, left the family's paintings to Tuscany in 1737 on the condition that they never leave the city, so they still hang in the streets where they were painted. Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi is here, abandoned in brown underpaint, its rearing horses never covered. Visited August 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Brancacci Chapel The fresco cycle around the chapel Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden The Tribute Money Florence. Masaccio frescoed this chapel in his early twenties and was dead at twenty-six. He gave his figures weight: they stand on the ground and throw shadows. By the entrance, Adam walks with both hands pressed over his face and Eve howls, head back and mouth open. Visited August 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Vatican City. Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512 standing on scaffolding with his head bent back, not lying on it, and wrote of the brush dripping onto his face. The 1994 cleaning took off four centuries of candle soot, and underneath were pinks, acid greens and oranges nobody had known were there. Michelangelo, photographed for Wikimedia Commons; public domain. I took none of my own. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Basilica San Vitale The apse entire, vault and windows Theodora and her retinue Justinian and his court, facing her Ravenna. Consecrated in 547. In the chancel Justinian stands with his court on one wall and Theodora with hers on the other, near life-size against grounds of gold leaf, the tesserae set at slight angles so the walls shift and flare as you cross the room. Neither of them ever came to Ravenna. Visited September 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Naoshima The walkway across the pond at Benesse House A painted wall in one of the museums The Seto Inland Sea. On an island of three thousand people, Tadao Ando sank a museum into the hillside in 2004 and lit it by daylight alone. Five of Monet's water lilies hang in a room floored with hundreds of thousands of small white marble tiles, and they brighten and dim as the weather changes outside. Visited May 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Fushimi Inari Inside the tunnel of vermilion torii Rows of torii climbing the hillside Kyoto. Roughly ten thousand vermilion torii line the paths up Mount Inari, set so close that the light through the gaps falls in bars across the steps. Each was paid for by a donor whose name is brushed in black on the back, so you climb through plain vermilion and come down past a list of names. Visited May 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Meow Wolf Neon alleyway over a striped violet floor A room papered floor to ceiling in black-and-white creatures Santa Fe. A collective of 135 artists filled a derelict bowling alley with a two-storey suburban house you leave by climbing through the refrigerator; George R. R. Martin put up the money for the lease. Visited February 2018. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Library of Congress The Main Reading Room from the visitors' gallery Washington. The British burned the first library in 1814; Jefferson sold Congress his own 6,487 volumes to replace it, and since 1870 the collection has taken in everything registered for American copyright — past 170 million items. The Main Reading Room is an octagon of marble columns under a dome 160 feet overhead. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Smithsonian Apollo 11's scorched command module Columbia The 1903 Wright Flyer in its gallery Washington, DC. James Smithson, the English chemist whose bequest founded it, never crossed the Atlantic in life; Alexander Graham Bell escorted his remains over from Genoa in 1904, and they lie in a crypt just inside the Castle's north door. Visited October 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Penn and Teller The Rio at night, the two of them ten storeys high on the tower The theatre before the show Las Vegas. The longest-running headline act in the city, at the Rio since 2001, and still being rebuilt from the inside: Penn says almost every element of the routine changes all the time, turned over fast, experimented with, brought back. It shows. They look like they are having the time of their lives, and they will explain a trick to you and then fool you with it anyway. Photographs by Nandaro, CC BY-SA 3.0, and Spheroidite, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.I wrote about it ↗ · Map ↗, the Strip The Strip at night from above The High Roller and the lights Las Vegas. Four miles of boulevard laid across the Mojave and built to be read from a moving car: a half-scale Eiffel Tower, a black glass pyramid with a beam so bright that free-tailed bats hunt moths inside the column of light. Venturi and Scott Brown came here in 1968 and concluded the signs were the architecture. Visited August 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.I wrote about it ↗ · Map ↗, Somerset Dam The dam wall across Lake Somerset Stanley River, Queensland. Begun in 1935, left unfinished in 1942 when the workforce was redirected to wartime dockyards, and only completed in 1953; the water it releases falls into Lake Wivenhoe, which backs up almost to the foot of the wall, so the dam empties not into a river but into another reservoir standing against its base. Visited August 2024. Photograph by Kerry Raymond, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Internet Archive The former Christian Science sanctuary, now the reading room The terracotta figures of the Archive's staff San Francisco. The Archive bought this 1923 Christian Science church on Funston Avenue partly because its Corinthian columns already resembled the organisation's logo. Inside, the hymn board lists 200, 404 and 451, and terracotta figures of staff who have stayed more than three years sit among the pews. Photographs by Beatrice Murch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, unnamed fire tower in New MexicoWest of Socorro, New Mexico. A hill picked to climb for its own sake, with a fire lookout on top of it and a great sweep of the state below. Towers like it were staffed all summer by one person with a map board and a pair of binoculars, taking a bearing on smoke and crossing it with a second tower's. Which one this was has never been established — possibly Davenport Lookout, in the Cibola. Visited October 2025. No picture of it I can use freely. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Very Large Array Dishes on the plain of San Agustin Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. The twenty-seven dishes sit on railroad track and are hauled to new positions by a purpose-built transporter every few months, so the telescope's resolution and field of view change with the configuration cycle. Visited October 2025. Photograph by dconvertini, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Los Alamos National Laboratory The Los Alamos Project main gate, 1943 Los Alamos, New Mexico. Wartime secrecy gave the whole mesa a single mailing address, P.O. Box 1663 in Santa Fe, so children born there had that post office box entered on their birth certificates as their place of birth. Visited July 2022. Photograph by Los Alamos National Laboratory, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Ghost Ranch The red cliffs under storm light Abiquiú, New Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe painted the cliffs here from a house on the ranch, and in 1947 a hillside on the same property gave up nearly a thousand Coelophysis skeletons tangled together in one Triassic bonebed. The land is a fragment of a 1766 Spanish grant, was a cattle rustlers' hideout in the 1880s, and has belonged to the Presbyterian Church since 1955. Photograph by Larry Lamsa, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Institute for Advanced Study Fuld Hall across the lawn Princeton, New Jersey. Von Neumann built one of the first stored-program computers here, over objections from colleagues who thought engineering beneath a school of pure thought; the machine was switched off in 1958 and the Institute has kept no laboratory since. Photograph by Zeete, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Dia: Beacon A long empty gallery, brick and daylight, a figure at the far end Window light striping the wide plank floor Beacon, New York. A 1929 Nabisco box-printing plant on the Hudson, converted in 2003 with almost no artificial light in the galleries: over 34,000 square feet of north-facing skylights do the work, so the museum's opening hours shrink with the winter daylight. Visited March 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Oppenheimer's house in Los Alamos (outside) The house on Bathtub Row Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer lived in this 1929 schoolmaster's cottage from 1943 to 1945; it had a bathtub, which almost nothing else in the wartime town did, and the street was renamed Bathtub Row for it. It was sold to a private owner in the 1960s and stayed somebody's ordinary house for decades. Visited July 2022. Photograph by NPS/Feller, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Einstein's house in Princeton (outside) 112 Mercer Street Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein lived at 112 Mercer Street from 1935 until his death in 1955 and asked that it never be turned into a shrine; the Institute for Advanced Study owns the white clapboard house today and keeps it as a private residence, with no plaque out front and "Private Residence" signs instead. Photograph by Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Openverse. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Hewlett-Packard garage Green garage doors at the end of the drive, seen through the gate Palo Alto. Hewlett and Packard's first big customer was Walt Disney, who bought eight of their audio oscillators to tune theatre sound systems for Fantasia. HP owns the garage and has restored it to its 1939 state, but there are no tours; you look at it from the footpath. Visited April 2021. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Tongariro track An emerald crater lake on the crossing Tongariro National Park, New Zealand. When the Te Maari crater erupted in 2012 it flung metre-wide blocks 1.5 km down the northern side of the track, holing the roof, floor and bunks of Ketetahi Hut on a winter night when nobody happened to be inside; the hut was removed for good in 2019. Photograph by Matt Clarke, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Wellington The harbour and the city on its peninsula Wellington. Lambton Quay was the shoreline when the settlers arrived in 1840; the 1855 earthquake lifted the seabed and reclamation did the rest, leaving the street about 250 metres inland, with plaques set into the footpath marking where the water once stopped. Photograph by Phillip Capper, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Milford Sound Mitre Peak from the water Fiordland, New Zealand. Roughly six metres of rain a year floats a tannin-stained freshwater layer on top of the seawater, and it cuts the light so sharply that black coral, normally an animal of the deep sea, grows here within a few metres of the surface. Photograph by Bernard Spragg, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Centerpoint tower The tower over the Sydney streets Sydney. The golden turret 250 metres up holds a 162,000-litre water tank whose sloshing damps the tower's sway, and 56 cables tie the shaft to the ground beneath the shopping centre at its base. Visited April 2026. Photograph by Greg O'Beirne, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Empire State Building The tower rising out of Midtown New York. The spire was built as a mooring mast for airships, with passengers meant to step off onto the 102nd floor, but the updrafts around the tower made docking impossible and the mast ended up carrying broadcast antennas instead. Visited September 2024. Photograph by Sam Valadi, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the World Trade Center Memorial A memorial pool, the names on its parapet, the Oculus behind Names cut through the bronze Small flags left in the letters New York. Two square voids in the footprints of the towers, water falling thirty feet down all four sides and then into a smaller square at the centre whose bottom you cannot see. The 2,983 names cut through the bronze parapets are not alphabetical: an algorithm arranged them by “meaningful adjacencies”, honouring some 1,200 requests from families to set a person beside the colleagues, friends or strangers they died next to. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Central Park (especially the Mall and the Ramble) The Conservatory Garden fountain A path through the Ramble New York. Every hill, pond and rock outcrop across Olmsted and Vaux's 843 acres was put there: bedrock blasted, swamp drained, hundreds of thousands of trees planted from 1858 on. The Mall runs a quarter mile under four rows of American elms; north of the Lake, warblers drop into the Ramble by the hundred each May. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Brooklyn Bridge The promenade between the cables New York City. A wire contractor smuggled rejected steel back into the cable supply, and by the time the fraud was found the bad wire was already spun into the bridge; Washington Roebling ordered 150 extra wires added to each cable rather than start over, and the defective wire is still up there. Visited July 2026. Photograph by Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford The frontage on St Giles' The panelled back room Oxford. The Inklings read aloud to each other in a back parlour here called the Rabbit Room until a 1962 refit opened it to the rest of the bar, at which point Lewis, Tolkien and the others simply crossed St Giles' to the Lamb and Flag. The pub has been shut since March 2020, now owned by the Ellison Institute of Technology and not expected to serve again before 2027. Visited June 2022. Photograph by Flickr user Dick Penn, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Flickr user manray3, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Bloomsbury Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon in its cabinet at UCL A Bloomsbury garden square under its plane trees Bloomsbury, London. Alasdair MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that the modern moral world was invented in these squares: G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica appeared in 1903, and the young Keynes, Woolf, Strachey and Forster took from it that the good is simply what you can see for yourself in certain states of mind. Bentham, who wanted the good counted instead, sits at the end of Gower Street in a wooden cabinet — his own skeleton, dressed in his clothes, under a wax head. Visited June 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Great Barrier Reef A coral outcrop on Flynn Reef Queensland. The living coral began growing on a far older limestone platform only about 9,000 years ago, when rising seas drowned a coastal plain whose hills are now the continental islands scattered through the reef. Photograph by Toby Hudson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Rob Roy Glacier The hanging glacier above the beech forest Mount Aspiring National Park, Otago. The ice hangs a thousand metres up and never reaches the valley floor, sending down only meltwater and the occasional avalanche; twenty thousand years ago the same glacier filled the Matukituki and fed the ice that gouged out Lake Wānaka. Photograph by ambo kangaroo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Wanaka The lake and its mountains at evening Wānaka, Otago. The crack willow standing in the shallows of the lake was cut about eighty years ago as a fence post, and rooted where it was driven in; the fence is long gone and the post is now among the most photographed trees anywhere. Lake Wānaka runs within a kilometre of Lake Hāwea, the two glacial troughs separated only by a rock ridge called The Neck. Photograph by Michelle Maria, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Te Anau Lake Te Anau at sunset from Henry Creek Te Anau, Fiordland. The takahē, a heavy flightless bird written off as extinct for half a century, was found alive in 1948 in the Murchison Mountains across the lake, and a breeding centre on the town's lakefront still works on bringing the species back. Photograph by Jens Hilligsøe, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Louvre The Cour Napoléon at dusk Paris. The building started as a fortress around 1190, and the stone base of Philippe Auguste's keep still stands in the basement, uncovered when the courtyard was dug out in the 1980s to make room for the entrance under the pyramid. Visited June 2024. Photograph by Benh Lieu Song, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Met Gilt-framed forest painting on a rose gallery wall An illuminated psalter open in its case, medieval hall beyond New York. The blocks of stone stacked above the columns on the Fifth Avenue front were meant to be carved into sculpture; the money ran out in 1902 and they were left rough. Inside, the Temple of Dendur arrived from Egypt in 661 crates, thanks for American help rescuing Nubian monuments from the rising Aswan reservoir. Visited July 2026. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Shinjuku/Shibuya Crossing The scramble crossing mid-cycle Tokyo. The stop-everything diagonal crossing is an American idea — the "Barnes dance", after a Denver traffic engineer — which North America largely gave up on as inefficient; Japan kept building them, and this one, opened in 1973 outside Shibuya Station, clears as many as three thousand people in a single green light, every two minutes. Visited May 2024. Photograph by Yoshikazu Takada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Imperial Palace Gardens in Toyko The East Gardens inside their moat, Tokyo behind Tokyo. The bare stone platform at the top of the gardens is the base of Edo Castle's keep: the tower burned in the Meireki fire of 1657, the base was rebuilt the next year, and then the shogunate decided the money was better spent on the burnt city and never put a tower back on it. Visited May 2024. Photograph by Don Ramey Logan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Coolum Beach Me on the beach in a wide-brimmed hat The headland and its hillside town seen along the wet sand Coolum Beach, Sunshine Coast. The flat-topped hill behind the town takes its name from a Kabi Kabi word for headless: Ninderry knocked Coolum's top off in a fight, and it landed in the sea as Mudjimba Island, a few kilometres offshore. Early settlers, less imaginatively, called the mountain Half Way Lump. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, SpaceX launch A Falcon 9 going up over the water at night Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX flies Falcon 9 from Pad 39A, the same pad Apollo 11 left from; the rocket is well clear of the tower before the sound reaches the viewing sites, and the booster comes back to land minutes later with a double sonic boom. Visited April 2024. Photograph by Gwendolyn Kurzen, US Space Force, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Saturn V and lunar modules at Kennedy Space Center The five F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage A lunar module in its gold foil A scorched Apollo command module Merritt Island, Florida. The 363-foot Saturn V hanging overhead never flew: its first stage was a ground-test article static-fired eighteen times and never meant to leave the pad, and its upper stages were built for Apollo 18 and 19, cancelled before launch. LM-9, the lunar module beneath it, was likewise finished for a Moon landing that was called off. Visited April 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Noosa National Park The headland beach through the scrub Noosa Heads, Queensland. Settlers set the headland aside as a reserve in 1879, sixty years before it was gazetted a national park; the coastal track that rounds it is now the most walked trail in the state, and the koalas above Tea Tree Bay sit low enough in the eucalypts to be seen from the path. Visited September 2024. Photograph by zpunout, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Land's End in San Francisco The ruins of the Sutro Baths under the headland San Francisco. The Coastal Trail runs along the roadbed of a cliffside railway that carried sightseers out toward the Cliff House until winter landslides tore out the tracks in February 1925, and at the lowest tides the rusted remains of wrecked ships still surface in the surf below Mile Rock. Visited June 2023. Photograph by Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Loch Ness Loch Ness running south between forested hills under broken cloud The Viewcatcher, a ring of driftwood on a drystone plinth above the loch Scottish Highlands. Twenty-three miles of water lying dead straight along the Great Glen fault, holding more than every lake in England and Wales combined and deep enough — over 200 metres — that it has never been recorded freezing over. Michael walked its whole length, on the hill path above the northern shore, the loch below on the right the entire way. Visited May 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Shakespeare and Company (Paris) The green shopfront and its queue seen across the cobbles The painted motto over the doorway to the reading room Paris. Not Sylvia Beach's shop, which published Ulysses and closed in 1941, but George Whitman's, which took the name in 1964. Some 30,000 "Tumbleweeds" have slept in beds tucked between the shelves, the rent being a book read each day, a few hours behind the counter, and a one-page autobiography. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Lamington National Park Bird's-nest ferns on a rainforest branch Queensland. The rainforest on this plateau grows on the eroded northern rim of a 23-million-year-old volcano, and includes Antarctic beech whose root systems have been carbon-dated to several thousand years. In 1937 the farmer Bernard O'Reilly reasoned out from a distant scorched treetop where a missing Stinson airliner had come down, walked into the ranges alone, and reached two survivors nine days after the crash. Visited April 2026. Photograph by John Robert McPherson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Meteor Crater The crater from the rim An Apollo test capsule at the visitor centre Northern Arizona: a bowl three-quarters of a mile across and 550 feet deep, punched into flat desert 50,000 years ago by an iron meteorite perhaps fifty metres wide. Blocks thrown out and overturned left the rim's strata in reverse order, the deepest layers uppermost. Apollo crews trained here before flying to the Moon. Visited March 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Biosphere 2 The glasshouses in the desert The approach Oracle, Arizona. Three acres of steel and 6,500 panes of glass enclosing a rainforest, an ocean with a coral reef, and a farm, sealed in 1991 with eight people inside for two years. The oxygen fell to 14.2 percent, the air of the high Andes. You can walk it now, rainforest to fog desert in minutes. Visited March 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Synergia Ranch The world map on the ranch library wall Santa Fe, New Mexico. A hundred and sixty acres of hardpan that John Allen and a handful of others bought in 1969, planted into an orchard, and built on by hand — geodesic domes and adobe. They ran a theatre company out of it, the Theater of All Possibilities, then a research ship, and then Biosphere 2. The people who sealed themselves into the glass in Arizona learned to build here first. Visited October 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Powell's Bookstore The main floor under its timber roof A staff-pick table deep in the Purple Room Portland, Oregon. The family business ran backwards: Michael Powell opened a used-book shop in Chicago in 1970, his father Walter spent a summer working there and went home to start his own store, and in 1982 the son bought out the father. New and used copies of a title sit side by side on the same shelf, across nine colour-coded rooms filling a city block. Visited July 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Page One and Page One TooAlbuquerque. A newsstand opened in 1981 that grew into two shops a few doors apart on Montgomery Boulevard, new books in one and used and remaindered in the other, the magazine racks still there beside deep shelves of engineering, computing and Western history. In 2014 the landlord gave the space to a Walmart grocery and the store moved a mile east; the Walmart is on the old site now. Visited July 2022. No photograph on the card yet. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Mill Valley Library The glass wall onto the redwoods The reading room under its timber roof Mill Valley, California. Donn Emmons set the 1966 building on a redwood slope above Old Mill Creek, with Lawrence Halprin doing the grounds; the reading room has floor-to-ceiling glass, a wood-burning fireplace, and walnut chairs built by hand by Art Carpenter. Photographs by BriefEdits, CC BY-SA, via Openverse, and Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Storm King Art Center Two black steel slabs on the meadow, walkers the size of specks Goldsworthy's drystone wall running away through the trees A vast arching bronze figure on the lawn Mountainville, New York. Five hundred acres of hill and meadow given over to sculpture since 1960, big enough that the pieces stand minutes apart on foot and the people walking between them read as specks. Andy Goldsworthy's Storm King Wall runs 2,278 feet of drystone down the slope, weaving between the trees, into the pond and out the far side. Visited May 2025. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Hogpen Hill Farms An Airstream trailer thrown into the air on a steel arm A rusted girder laid across two standing stones A field of grey slabs standing in the meadow Woodbury, Connecticut. Edward Tufte — who wrote the books on how to show information — bought two hundred and thirty acres of Connecticut hill and has spent years setting his own sculpture across it: an Airstream trailer flung into the air on a steel arm, a rusted girder laid across two standing stones, cut-steel figures with names like Celestial Dancer with Calipers and Her DNA, a room of stainless-steel Feynman diagrams. He opens the gates a few weekends each autumn, by the carload. Visited September 2024. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Hogpen Hill Farms ↗ · Map ↗, the anthropology museum in Mexico City El paraguas: the canopy on its single column, water falling from the rim The Temple of Quetzalcoatl facade, feathered serpents and Tlaloc heads A full-size Teotihuacan reconstruction under warm light Mexico City. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's museum, opened in 1964, is built around a courtyard roofed by one vast concrete canopy carried on a single carved column, with water falling from its rim all day in a curtain. The halls beneath hold the Aztec sun stone, the Olmec heads, Pakal's jade mask, and full-size reconstructions of Teotihuacan painted as they once were. On Christmas Eve 1985 two veterinary students walked out with 124 pieces of it; it took four years to get them back. Visited June 2023. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the Museum of Jurassic Technology The front of the museum: its sign, a fountain in an arched niche, and the door The fountain in its niche beside the entrance Culver City, Los Angeles. David Wilson's museum, open since 1988, keeps its lights low and its labels perfectly straight, and will not tell you which of its exhibits are true: a bat said to fly through solid walls, Geoffrey Sonnabend's three-volume theory of forgetting, sculptures small enough to sit in the eye of a needle. Wilson was given a MacArthur for it in 2001. Upstairs there is tea. No photographs are allowed inside, which is why this is the door. Visited March 2023. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, the boardwalk and pier in Venice Beach and Santa Monica The walk out to the pier, the Hippodrome and the Ferris wheel ahead The bay and the coast seen from the water's edge Los Angeles. Abbot Kinney dug canals in the sand in 1905 and called it Venice of America; most were filled in by the 1920s, but the Ocean Front Walk is still miles of buskers, bodybuilders and the skate park. North of it the Santa Monica Pier has stood since 1909, with a solar-powered Ferris wheel, a carousel inside the 1916 Hippodrome, and a sign at the end calling it the end of Route 66. Visited March 2023. Photos by me. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗.

I'd like to go: Font de Gaume A bison from the cave wall Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. Font-de-Gaume is the last cave of polychrome Palaeolithic painting still open to the public; at Lascaux you are shown replicas. You edge through a fissure called the Rubicon into the cliff, and there are the bison: two hundred figures in red ochre and black manganese, seventeen thousand years old. Reproduction by Henri Breuil and Louis Capitan, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Dresser formation of the Pilbara Craton Dresser Formation, Pilbara, Western Australia The Pilbara, Western Australia. In ridges of chert near Marble Bar, rock dated to 3.48 billion years ago preserves laminated domes and cones — stromatolites, built layer by layer by mats of microbes, among the oldest traces of life on Earth. The same shapes are still made by living mats at Hamelin Pool in Shark Bay. Photograph by James St. John, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Siccar Point Hutton's unconformity: upended grey strata with red sandstone lying across their tops Berwickshire, on the coast east of Edinburgh. Grey greywacke stands on end in the cliff, and across its worn-down tops lie red sandstones laid some sixty-five million years later; the line between them is the missing time. James Hutton came here by boat in 1788 looking for exactly that line, and found an Earth with “no vestige of a beginning.” John Playfair, beside him, wrote that the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time, and that they became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow. The Deep Time Trail runs out over the grass to the clifftop. Photograph by Lysippos, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Avebury Avebury, Wiltshire Avebury, Wiltshire. A ditch nine metres deep, cut from the chalk with red deer antler picks, encloses a stone circle 330 metres across: about a hundred sarsens stood on end around 2850 BC, the largest over forty tonnes. A village and a pub sit inside it now, and unlike at Stonehenge you can put your hand on the stones. Photograph by Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Watership Down Watership Down, Hampshire Hampshire. A chalk ridge above the Kennet valley: sheep-cropped turf, a hanger of beeches along the crest, racehorses working the Kingsclere gallops. Richard Adams changed nothing of the country when he wrote it down — Nuthanger Farm still stands below the hill, and the rabbits' journey can be walked in a day. Photograph by Mr Ignavy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Amritsar The Golden Temple at night, lit on the water Amritsar. The Harmandir Sahib stands on an island in a square pool, its upper storeys sheathed in gold leaf and doubled in the reflection below. You go down steps to reach it rather than up, and a door on each of its four sides lets anyone enter from any direction. The langar beside it feeds tens of thousands a day, free. Photograph by Harvinder Chandigarh, cc by 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Lightning Field Lightning striking among the poles Quemado, New Mexico. In 1977 Walter De Maria set four hundred stainless steel poles into the high desert, each cut to its own length so the sharpened tips rise to one level plane. You stay the night, six at a time: in the half hour after sunrise the low light runs up the steel and the grid stands burning on the plain. Photograph by John Cliett, for Dia Art Foundation. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Clock of the Long Now The Interval, with the orrery and the Manual for Civilization Sierra Diablo Mountains, West Texas. A 500-foot shaft bored up through limestone, its walls cut into a spiral staircase by a robot saw, holds Danny Hillis's clock, which ticks once a year and moves its century hand once a century. Brian Eno wrote the chimes: ten bells, in a different order daily for ten thousand years. Photograph courtesy of the Long Now Foundation. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Yorkshire dales Swaledale from Kisdon Hill, walled fields under the moor Walled meadows and a stone field barn at Gunnerside The Yorkshire Dales. Glacial valleys in limestone, divided into fields by drystone walls laid without mortar — thousands of miles of them — with a stone barn to almost every meadow. Alf Wight was a vet at Thirsk and wrote this country into the James Herriot books; Bill Bryson lived in it, and it draws some of the warmest writing in Notes from a Small Island. Photographs by Kreuzschnabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, Roden crater The crater bowl and the eye of the volcano The Painted Desert, Arizona. Since 1977 James Turrell has been hollowing a 400,000-year-old cinder cone into a naked-eye observatory that has never opened. The bowl at the summit is graded so the sky closes overhead into a dome; an 854-foot tunnel casts the setting moon onto white marble once every 18.61 years. Photograph © James Turrell / Roden Crater, used with attribution. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Kilimanjaro Kilimanjaro from the Amboseli plain Tanzania. A volcano standing alone off the plain, 5,895 metres, the highest point in Africa — and on the ordinary routes there is no rope and no technical climbing, just about a week of walking. It takes you out of rainforest into heath, then alpine desert, then glacier ice three degrees south of the equator. Photograph by Dan Lundberg, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Atacama Desert The Milky Way arching over a rock spire A dune curving between salt-crusted ridges in the Valle de la Luna Northern Chile. The driest place on Earth outside the poles: weather stations that have never once recorded rain, riverbeds dry for millions of years, soil so sterile it is used to rehearse the search for life on Mars. Which is also why the telescopes are here — the air over the Chajnantor plateau holds so little water that ALMA can see the millimetre light everywhere else swallows. Every few years enough rain falls that the whole desert flowers. Photographs by P. Horálek/ESO, CC BY 4.0, and Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Wikipedia ↗ · Map ↗, LIGO LIGO Hanford Observatory Hanford, Washington. Two arms four kilometres long meet at right angles in the sagebrush, laser light bouncing between 40-kilogram mirrors of fused silica hung on glass fibres. The instrument can see those mirrors move by about a ten-thousandth of the width of a proton — which is what it did on 14 September 2015, when two black holes merged 1.3 billion light years away. Photograph by NOIRLab/LIGO/NSF/AURA/T. Matsopoulos, BY, via Wikimedia. Note by Claude.Map ↗, CERN The LHC tunnel and its magnets Geneva. Twenty-seven kilometres of ring lie under farmland on both sides of the French–Swiss border, magnets colder than interstellar space, protons swung around eleven thousand times a second into detectors the size of cathedrals. ATLAS and CMS announced the Higgs boson on 4 July 2012, forty-eight years after the papers that predicted it. Photograph by Julian Herzog, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Square Kilometer Array MeerKAT dishes in the Karoo The Karoo, South Africa, and the Murchison, Western Australia. One telescope on two continents, in deserts chosen for radio silence: 197 dishes across 150 kilometres of scrub, and 131,072 metal spikes on red Australian dirt. Both listen for the 21-centimetre hydrogen line, stretched by expansion back to the first stars. Photograph by the SKA Observatory, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Olympus Mons Olympus Mons, Mars Mars. A shield volcano twenty-two kilometres high and six hundred across, so wide that the summit lies beyond the horizon, ending in a cliff up to eight kilometres high. Mariner 9 arrived in 1971 to find the planet swallowed by a dust storm, four dark spots standing above it: the summits of the great volcanoes. Photograph by Image by NASA, modifications by Seddon, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude., Everest Base Camp Khumbu, Nepal. The camp sits at 5,364 metres on the Khumbu Glacier itself — rubble over moving ice, where tent platforms are re-cut through the season as the ice shifts beneath them. Everest's summit stays hidden behind Nuptse; what fills the view is the Khumbu Icefall, house-sized seracs cracking through the night. Photograph by Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Complex City Complex One and the concrete forms of City Garden Valley, Nevada. Michael Heizer began City in 1972 and was still building it fifty years later: a mile and a half of compacted earth, rock and concrete on an empty high-desert floor, proportioned after ancient ceremonial architecture. It opened in 2022, reached by dirt road, and admits six visitors a day. Photograph courtesy of the Triple Aught Foundation. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Kitty Hawk The first flight, 17 December 1903 Kill Devil Hills. The Wright brothers picked this stretch of the Outer Banks out of Weather Bureau records — steady wind, soft sand to come down on, almost nobody around. On the morning of 17 December 1903 they flew four times, the last 852 feet in 59 seconds. Stones set in the grass mark where each flight ended. Photograph by John T. Daniels, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Spiral Jetty Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake Rozel Point, Utah. In April 1970 Robert Smithson had dump trucks tip more than six thousand tons of black basalt into the Great Salt Lake, laying a counterclockwise coil 1,500 feet long in water that microorganisms turn rose-pink. The jetty went under in 1972 and surfaced in 2002 with every rock crusted in white salt. Photograph by Sculpture: Robert Smithson 1938-1973Image:Soren.harward at en.wikipedia, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Svalbard seed vault The lit wedge of the vault entrance in the snow Longyearbyen, Svalbard. A concrete wedge rises out of the snow at 78° north, and behind it a tunnel runs more than a hundred metres into a sandstone mountain to chambers holding over a million seed samples at −18°C. The first withdrawal came in 2015, when ICARDA asked for the seeds it had left in its Aleppo gene bank. Photograph by Dag Endresen, attribution licence, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Hyperion tree Hyperion, Redwood National Park Redwood National Park, California. In 2006 a coast redwood was found here at 116 metres tall, the tallest living thing yet measured, near the physical ceiling for a tree. Its location has never been published and approaching it carries a fine, but the groves around it hold trees nearly as tall, and those can be walked. Photograph by Redwood National and State Parks, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Cave of Hands Cueva de las Manos, Argentina Santa Cruz, Patagonia. In a rock overhang above the Pinturas River canyon, more than 800 hands are stencilled in red, ochre, white and black, each made by holding a hand against the stone and blowing mineral pigment around it through a bone pipe. The oldest are about 9,300 years old, and nearly all are left hands. Photograph by Mariano, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Tranquility Base Aldrin's bootprint in the lunar soil The Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Aldrin were outside for two and a half hours on 20 July 1969, and never went further than about sixty metres from the lander. Eagle's descent stage still stands there, the bootprints around it undisturbed — no wind, no rain, only the slow sandblasting of micrometeorites. Photograph by Buzz Aldrin, NASA, public domain. Note by Claude., Papakolea (Green Sand Beach) Papakōlea Green Sand Beach, Hawaii Ka Lae, Hawaii. The beach lies in the sea-breached flank of a cinder cone near the southernmost point of the United States, and its sand is olivine, peridot in gem quality, dense enough to stay put while the surf carries the lighter grains away. A whole bay of green, the colour of old bottle glass, under black cliffs. Photograph by Pushkr from , United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Allen Telescope Array (SETI) Allen Telescope Array, California Hat Creek, California. Forty-two white dishes, each 6.1 metres across, stand on a lava flat ringed by ridges that screen out the radio noise of towns and traffic. Jill Tarter spent two decades getting the array built and the first dishes came online in 2007; the search has yet to turn up a signal. Photograph by nebulousness, public domain, via Flickr. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa Racetrack Playa, Death Valley Death Valley, California. Stones lie on a dry lakebed so level its two ends differ by a few centimetres, each trailing a track hundreds of metres long, some bending at right angles. Bob Sharp watched seven winters without seeing one move; in December 2013 thin panes of ice floated them along at a few metres a minute. Photograph by Romain Guy from San Francisco, USA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Auschwitz Auschwitz-Birkenau Oświęcim, Poland. About 1.1 million people were murdered here, most of them Jews, and the site is kept as it was found: the rail spur running through the Birkenau gatehouse to the ramp, the chimneys of the vanished barracks in rows across the fields. Auschwitz I holds some 110,000 shoes and two tonnes of human hair. Photograph by Stanisław Mucha, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Yad Vashem The Hall of Names, looking up into the cone of photographs Jerusalem. Moshe Safdie's Holocaust History Museum is a concrete prism 180 metres long driven through the hillside, lit by one slot of skylight, ending on a balcony above the forest. It closes with the Hall of Names, a cone hung with six hundred photographs of the dead, over an identical cone cut into the bedrock. Photograph courtesy of Yad Vashem. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Garden of the Righteous The Garden of the Righteous, Yad Vashem Jerusalem. Since 1962, trees have been planted on the hillside at Yad Vashem for non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, each with the rescuer's name at its foot; when the ground filled, the names continued on stone walls. More than 28,000 are recognized, all of whom risked life or liberty and took no payment. Photograph by Fallaner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Old Jerusalem The Old City, Jerusalem Jerusalem. Inside Suleiman the Magnificent's walls, in under a square kilometre, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock stand ten minutes' walk from one another. Every lane around them is faced in the same pale meleke limestone, and in the last hour of daylight the city turns gold. Photograph by Berthold Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Trinity site The obelisk at ground zero, and its plaque Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. At 5:29 on the morning of 16 July 1945 a plutonium device on a 100-foot steel tower released some twenty kilotons here, taking the tower entirely and fusing the desert sand to pale green glass. The trinitite is still in the ground, and the range opens to visitors a couple of days a year. Photograph by Talltanbarbie, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Deetjen's Big Sur Inn Deetjen's Big Sur Inn, California Big Sur, California. Helmuth Deetjen bought six acres in Castro Canyon in 1926 and built the inn himself, Norwegian-style cabins of rough redwood with single-wall construction you can hear straight through. Every room holds a journal, and you can lie in bed reading what strangers wrote there before you. Photograph by Sarah Morris, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Petra Petra, Jordan Petra. The Nabataeans cut their capital downward into pink sandstone, beginning at the top of each facade so they never needed scaffolding. You reach it through the Siq, a kilometre of fault-split gorge with walls over a hundred metres high, which turns a last corner onto the forty-metre front of the Treasury. Photograph by Berthold Werner, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Kumbh Mela Kumbh Mela, Prayagraj Prayagraj. After the monsoon the Ganges and the Yamuna fall back, leaving miles of sand at their confluence; in weeks a city of tented streets and pontoon bridges rises on it for the largest gathering on Earth. On one day in 2013 some thirty million bathed there; then it comes down and the rivers have the ground back. The next here is the half-Kumbh of 2031, the full one in 2037. Photograph by Michael T Balonek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Isle of Skye Isle of Skye, Scotland Isle of Skye. The Black Cuillin is the eroded core of a volcano active 60 million years ago: twelve kilometres of bare gabbro ridge carrying eleven Munros, coarse enough to grip boot rubber like sandpaper and magnetic enough to pull a compass off true. One summit, the Inaccessible Pinnacle, has taken a rope since 1880. Photograph by Adrian Pingstone, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Shrine of the Book The white dome over the Dead Sea Scrolls Jerusalem. A white dome curved like the lids of the jars the scrolls were found in stands above the underground galleries. At the centre is the Great Isaiah Scroll, copied around 125 BCE, a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible manuscript known before it, and differing from the medieval text hardly at all. Photograph by Djampa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Nazare Nazaré, Portugal Nazaré. Europe's largest submarine canyon runs in almost to the sand at Praia do Norte, where swell over the trench and swell over the shelf arrive together and stack into one peak. Sebastian Steudtner rode a 26.2-metre wave here in 2020, the largest ever ridden; you watch from a 1577 fort close enough to take the spray. Photograph by Terry Kearney from liverpool, merseyside, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Adam-ondi-Ahman The Grand River valley in mist Farmland above the Grand River in Missouri, bought by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and kept as open pasture. Joseph Smith identified it in 1838 as the place Adam went after Eden, and where he blessed his descendants three years before he died. Photograph by Ryan Reeder, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Cumorah The monument on the hill A low drumlin left by the last ice sheet, in farm country west of Palmyra. Joseph Smith said he was shown golden plates buried here in 1823 and took them away four years later; a monument by Torleif Knaphus stands on the crest. Photograph by runt35, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Starbase Starbase, Texas Starbase, Texas. On salt flats near the mouth of the Rio Grande, SpaceX builds and flies Starship — over 120 metres tall, the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched, its bare stainless hull mirror-bright above the marsh grass. On 13 October 2024 the launch tower's arms caught the returning booster in mid-air. Photograph by Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Galapagos Galápagos giant tortoises The Galápagos. Volcanic islands 600 miles off Ecuador, where cold currents put penguins on black lava shores with cactus and giant tortoises. Darwin found the animals so unafraid in 1835 that he pushed a hawk off a branch with his gun muzzle. The tameness has held: marine iguanas warm themselves on the rock beside you. Photograph by Dallas Krentzel, cc by 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Troy Troy, Turkey Troy. A low mound near the Dardanelles holding nine cities stacked one on another across roughly three thousand years. The limestone walls of Troy VI still stand several metres high, sloping inward, courses unbroken for long stretches. Alexander stopped here in 334 BC to sacrifice at the temple of Athena. Photograph by Jorge Láscar from Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Nevada National Security Site Sedan Crater and its viewing platform Nine hundred and twenty-eight nuclear tests were carried out here between 1951 and 1992, a hundred of them in the open air. Sedan Crater is 390 metres across and 100 deep, dug in 1962 by a single buried device to see whether bombs could do civil engineering. Free public tours run about once a month; no cameras. Photograph by Jarek Tuszyński, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, Kuthodaw Pagoda Kuthodaw Pagoda, Mandalay Mandalay. Between 1860 and 1868 King Mindon had the entire Pali canon cut into 729 marble slabs, each about five feet tall, and gave every slab its own whitewashed stupa in rows at the foot of Mandalay Hill. One person reading aloud eight hours a day would need about 450 days to reach the end. Photograph by DANIEL JULIE from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Kaaba The Kaaba and the crowd circling it Mecca. A cube of grey granite about thirteen metres high, wrapped in black silk embroidered in gold with verses of the Qur'an, the cloth renewed once a year. Every mosque on Earth is oriented toward this single point, and pilgrims walk seven counter-clockwise circuits around it, day and night through most of the year. Photograph by Shahin Olakara, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque A dome and its band of calligraphy Abu Dhabi. White Macedonian marble finished in 2007: 82 domes, more than a thousand columns inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The prayer hall holds the largest hand-knotted carpet ever made, 5,600 square metres and over two billion knots. At night the lighting tracks the phases of the moon, whitening as it fills. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the National Museum in Damascus National Museum of Damascus Damascus. Inside stands the painted room of the synagogue at Dura-Europos, its walls covered in 244 and preserved because Roman soldiers packed the building with earth against a Sasanian siege. A case holds the clay tablet from Ugarit, thirty cuneiform signs cut around 1400 BC, the earliest alphabet we have. Photograph by User:Aziz1005, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the agora in Athens The Stoa of Attalos above the excavated Agora The Temple of Hephaestus on the hill at the western edge Athens. The square where the city did its public business, and where Socrates spent his days talking to anyone who would stop. The Temple of Hephaestus still stands nearly whole on the hill at its western edge, and excavations turned up the kleroterion, the slotted slab of stone that picked juries by lot. Photograph by DerHexer, CC BY-SA 3.0, and by Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Suez Canal The Ever Given wedged across the canal, from orbit Egypt, Port Said to Suez. There are no locks — the Mediterranean and the Red Sea sit at almost the same level — so the canal is simply a 193-kilometre cut through desert. From the bank you watch four-hundred-metre ships move through the sand at the speed of a bicycle, hulls high above the dunes with no water in sight. Photograph by NASA, public domain. Note by Claude.Map ↗, the Panama Canal A ship in the locks Panama. A ship is shut into a concrete chamber and raised twenty-six metres to Gatún Lake, crosses the continental divide, and is let down to the far ocean. Nothing is pumped: the lifting is fresh water falling out of the lake under gravity, two hundred million litres a ship. The 1914 locks are still in service. Photograph by Lyn Gateley, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗, and the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest White Mountains, eastern California. At ten thousand feet, bristlecone pines live close to five thousand years; most of what stands is dead, the living tree often a strip of bark running up wood sandblasted by wind and ice nearer bone than timber. Their eight-thousand-year ring record corrected radiocarbon dating. Photograph by daveynin from United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Note by Claude.Map ↗. The UNESCO World Heritage List and the UNESCO Memory of the World Register are an ongoing inspiration.

"Travel is the only education": I don't recall who said this, but it's stayed with me as containing some important insight. Perhaps because different places and different cultures are so incredibly and diversely generative. You stand in the Imperial Garden in Tokyo, and you're just immersed in this incredible depth around you. And then you visit the Strip in Las Vegas, and there's an entirely different type of depth. Even you can't articulate it, you can feel it, and it's reflected all around.

Something I don't like about the phrase is that it has medicinal, do-this-it's-good-for-you overtones. But good travel is refreshing and rejuvenating; it shouldn't be done for puritanical, let's check-off-the-checkboxes reasons.

Countries visited (bold means lived in for a year or more): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Wales.