TP Thursday: Did You See That?!

We tell you about the destinations, but don’t always mention those entertaining sights (and sites) along the way. Those brief snapshots in time . . . so fleeting. . .so unexpected. . .but oh, so memorable, like in:

Tuscany, Italy


We had been, for some time, the only ones traveling this two-lane road through Tuscany last fall.  Yet, we stopped and waited at the red light. . .and waited. . .and waited, to the point we started thinking it might be some sort of joke. When, finally, it turned green, we found major road construction just around the corner had narrowed the road to a single lane.

Eastern Washington State



We’d passed through a number of picturesque small towns as we drove from Spokane, Washington to Joseph, Oregon but none had as clever a welcome sign as did the town of Anatone, a tiny spot  in the southeastern part of the state.

Nothing, Arizona



Nothing, Arizona is just that these days. The sign on US 93 between mile markers 148 and 149 is six miles north of the junction of Hwy 97.  It once was the site of an operating rock shop, and a gas station and even a pizza joint.

Sfakia, Crete

That is a roadside guard rail at the top of the photo, framing this beast of beauty we spotted sunning itself one fine day on the southwestern coast of Crete.  This laid-back sunbather could have been posed there for the attention he gave to my phototaking.

Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway

State Route 375 is a long, lonesome 98-mile stretch of highway in remote southern Nevada. Like other similar roadways  in Nevada and Arizona, it provides immense stretches of vast, barren high desert-scapes. 
What sets it apart from those other roadways – besides the fact it’s near ‘Area 51’ which was for sometime a top-secret government research and test facility within the Nellis Air Force Base’s Bombing and Gunnery Range -- is that in 1996 it was officially named the Extraterrestrial Highway because of the UFO and other paranormal activities recorded here.

We’d chuckled about not seeing anything extraterrestrial or otherwise as we drove between Crystal Springs and Warms Springs, on that particular morning. About then, this is what we saw in the distance:

                                 Alien Research Center- Jackie Smith photo

We drove past, but I insisted I had to take a photo, so we returned to the parking lot so I could take the above shot. It was then we saw the sign "Alien Research Center."   Hmmm, not a person in sight, although the sign read, ‘museum and gift shop now open’. 

That was two years ago. I Googled it then and again this week and found no more information on either of my investigations than I have told you of this place located at:  100 Extraterrestrial Highway, Hiko, Nevada: It is simply there.

That’s it for this week’s Travel Photo Thursday. Hope you visit Nancy’s Budget Travelers Sandbox today for more fun photos. And if you’ve not yet checked out TravelnWrite’s Facebook page hope you’ll drop by there as well.

How about you? What have you seen on your travels  made you exclaim, “Did you see that?!”