Yet another of my obsessions (as you may have guessed form my Alcatraz visit) is that I love falling down buildings and decay. I don’t see it as a negative. I think it can be beautiful in its own right so the chance to visit the abandoned town of Bodie was one that I refused to miss.
Bodie Ghost Town is an abondoned gold mining town and now a State Historic Park.
The drive up to Bodie is along a dirt road, you think you’re going nowhere until eventually you see a single wee paypoint and a big guy with a big gun and an equally big dog!
I can’t say for sure but I suspect the car wheels were still spinning when I launched myself out of it, camera in hand and started snapping away like there was no tomorrow. Eventually the Fiance caught up and I was able to enter Bodie proper.
Being the juveline that he is, the Fiance was particularly amused by the signage stating we were in ‘Virgin Alley’ until he realised it was the red light district of old! Apparantly the ‘ladies of the night’ used to carry red lanterns to show just exactly what they were selling – hence the ‘red light district’.
Another interesting fact was that the snow can reach 20ft in Bodie, that’s higher than all of the houses! It must have been one grim place to live when the snow was up over your roof.
Unfortunately you can only get inside two buildings, a church and a house – if I lived closer I’d become a friend of it for sure! Rather than do a massive post telling you about the visit I decided to let the pictures do the talking.
You might like to read these too :
