Road Trip; June 25, 2007: Part IIc

The graffiti in the area was terrible. A lot of it was class of '07 markings. Some of the more interesting examples:






My personal favorite (I swear I didn't write this):


Part of route 61 to be closed because of subsidence. Walking down closed route 61...





Something doesn't look right...


Can you see why the road is closed?





People like to watch things burn.
















Walking away...



Some graffiti in other areas of town:



We were a little disappointed because we thought Centralia would be like a ghost town, out in the boondocks. Route 61 runs right through the middle of town and at least one car went by about every 2 minutes, so it's not really that deserted. Since we went in June, everything was really grown over so you couldn't get a good feel of the fact that this is basically a town with a street grid, fire hydrants, and power lines, but no houses. You can't see it in any of my pictures, but smoke was coming out of the cracks and you could smell sulfur. Rusty and I are going back around Christmas to catch some of what we missed and to get some good smoke pics. Centralia is a horrific example of what human carelessness can do.

Here is a good website with Centralia information. I submitted some of my pictures to them and am hoping they'll get them up. They seem to be about a month behind. They also link to pretty much every Centralia site there is. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods briefly discusses Centralia. I recommend that book and his others; he's an excellent travel writer. This is a video made in 2002 by the Discovery Channel.