Those Soviet high-rises always look the same, occupied or not, don't they?

Are you trying to tell use that ATU is washed up again?

Anyways, here's an update on Wedderburn (aka Midgetville).

Here's the true story--very different from the legend--(it's gone now, but there aint' gonna be no condos; they're building million-dollar houses even as we speak):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8503162@N02/sets/72157600270358668/

That photographer got there too late, a year earlier it didn't look so bad, and the little hotel was still standing. There used to be clowns like these driving through, looking for midgets:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1732507233897058056#

I make that right turn onto Wedderburn every day (and there ain't no "cookie-cutter development" around Wedderburn).

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
--Shelley




In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
—Horace Smith.



As children my friends and I would escape into the wild tropic trees and plants of Kona and play in a long abandoned house where hippies used to live hidden in nature. We didn't play near the underground fires of lava flows though.



The grass withers and the flowers fade...

Too true--it's gone, gone, gone.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4557536148

The interior of the original "hotel" in the woods near the Wedderburn train station (long gone) on the Washington & Old Dominion Railroad (since converted to the W&OD bike trail):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfMVQf3M1qQ

Rather scarey, yes?

I was in there myself, about the same time. I'd like to have seen it back when it was still open for business. It was built back before air conditioning. People would take the train up here to get away from the heat in DC, stay in the hotel or the cottages, and walk around mid the shade trees.

http://www.abandonedstations.org.uk/

London Underground's "Ghost" tube stations. i.e. disused/abandoned stations you occasionally glimpse from a moving train.

Not the same thing at all as tube stations with ghosts- we have quite a few of those, too- but that's the subject of a different thread.