I noticed I was standing in the rain enjoying a sentence I had not written yet, about a place I had not seen yet. That was the point at which the whole project of finding places nobody goes started to look like a scoreboard.
The word I hear most often about places I drove four hours to reach is nice. It took me a while to understand that nice is not modesty or secrecy. It is an accurate description delivered by someone with unlimited access.
There is no website, no opening hours, no reviews, and no confirmation the road still goes through. What I actually do before driving somewhere I know almost nothing about, learned mostly from getting it wrong.
Two hours of gravel for eleven houses, a locked church, and a bus shelter with nothing pinned inside it. An honest account of a trip that produced nothing, and of the much better post I nearly wrote instead.
Most of the places in this section reach me as a half heard sentence with no spelling attached. Here is how I chase those fragments, why the success rate is bad, and what I do with a name once I finally have one.
A draft about a set of river pools sat unpublished in my folder for four months while I worked out whether posting it would do damage. The honest answer involved looking at my own traffic numbers and finding them small.