Does anyone live near anywhere interesting?

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Living in Strasbourg in the East of France so we have a few good things around:

The cathedral of course

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The Haut Koenigsbourg castle

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John Howe studied art in Strasbourg and sometimes you can see the influence in his paintings.
 
Huh, strong reactions to Newgrange.

I also want to point out that in addition to its age, there's no evidence that Ireland was home at the time to the kind of urbanised society with complex administration you'd find producing monuments even then around the Nile, the Euphrates, or on Crete. The motives and organisation to assemble it would have had to come from something else.

I know somebody who was writing a screenplay concerned with the structure at around the same time I was starting to read Mummy: the Curse, so I had some things in mind for ominous activities in prehistory and what they leave behind to be observed today.

That part given a bit of an extra edge by reading about how it's speculated that the inhabitants of Ireland responsible for it have no living descendants at all, and perhaps not even any surviving vestiges of their culture. Passage tombs like Newgrange and the artifacts found within are all that's left of them.
 
Yeah, the oldest permanent structure near me, excluding Native burial mounds, is from 1825. Old, yes, but nothing like what's being posted here.
That’s the same here. In San Antonio not to far from here is a Spanish mission from the late 1750s. That as old as fabricated stuff gets around here. I told a buddy of mine in Hertfordshire about the mission and he said pish posh there’s a pub on his street older than that.
 
European Pub-goers are at an unfair advantage in this thread.
Only if you let people go unchallenged in conflating what is interesting with what is old!

I'm pretty sure if I looked around a bit I could find something within ten miles of significance to the Irish War of Independence (1920s), which... for gaming purposes could be relevant to matters of how people organise clandestine movements and conflicts, especially if somebody wanted to set in in that time period.

European pubs can't host the Algonquin Round Table.
 
Rode by the castle on 840 on my way up to the Game Keep the other day. (when I snagged some Cyberpunk stuff) I take the long route just to open the bike up and relax versus heading up I-65 and going through Nashville traffic. Adds some miles going that route up to I-40 west but often it's worth it for me piece of mind wise.

I've just really had no real desire to see the place. I think spending the decade in Europe and visiting many fascinating real castles with history taking back over a 1000 years in some cases spoiled me. I used to jump on the autobahn and do lunch in Rothenburg ob der Tauber just for kicks and at one I was only an hour from mad King Ludwig's castles Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. which aren't the truly ancient castles. Though the one was built on the ruins of more ancient castle. There is Linderhof, which was one of my favorite places, it was really peaceful to sit on the steps and just watch the fountain, listening to the water.

Also the robber baron castles long the rivers are worth a visit. My favorite areas are near the mountains though, the Alps was a place that did it for me and almost caused me to go native after the military. lol I think that's why though living in TN is not bad and I can deal with the heat and humidity, I truly miss real mountains like the Pacific Northwest ranges (Sierras, Cascades etc) and the Rockies in Colorado. Hmm getting badly off topic might need either an old man nap or coffee.
 
Rode by the castle on 840 on my way up to the Game Keep the other day. (when I snagged some Cyberpunk stuff) I take the long route just to open the bike up and relax versus heading up I-65 and going through Nashville traffic. Adds some miles going that route up to I-40 west but often it's worth it for me piece of mind wise.

I've just really had no real desire to see the place.

That is fair. I’ve never been myself and I’ve lived in midTN since 1994.

I haven’t been to The Game Keep since Karl sold it. No issue with the owners, I barely made it up there once a year before and I used to part-time there.
 
Only if you let people go unchallenged in conflating what is interesting with what is old!

I'm pretty sure if I looked around a bit I could find something within ten miles of significance to the Irish War of Independence (1920s), which... for gaming purposes could be relevant to matters of how people organise clandestine movements and conflicts, especially if somebody wanted to set in in that time period.

European pubs can't host the Algonquin Round Table.
Pubs are ALWAYS interesting!
 
Oh, also, I don't live anywhere near there but I've been to the site of Cadbury Castle. Not much to see there now, but it's one of the places talked about as a site for Camelot. (Which is obviously bollocks, but a nice story).
 
Huh. Maybe that explains a curious idiosyncrasy about New Englanders: the exact same thing about 100 miles being a giant distance. I live two hours' drive from Boston, but to your average Bostonian, western Massachusetts might as well have "Hic Draconis Est" written over the Berkshires. Now I get it: lingering echoes of Britishness!

When I was stationed in Atlanta on a project (back in my IT days), I encountered the mystical barrier known as I-285. When we would look for somewhere to go eat lunch or dinner, the locals I worked with would steadfastly refuse to journey "OTP" ("Outside the Perimeter" of I-285), even if it was only 5 miles away and their alternate suggestions were twice as far. They anything in the category of "OPT" as "far, far away."

That always puzzled me. Coming from Texas, anything within an hour's drive at non-stop highway speeds is "pretty close" to me. Half an hour away is "just up the road." A three or four hour drive (each way) still falls well within the bounds of a "day trip."
 
When I was stationed in Atlanta on a project (back in my IT days), I encountered the mystical barrier known as I-285. When we would look for somewhere to go eat lunch or dinner, the locals I worked with would steadfastly refuse to journey "OTP" ("Outside the Perimeter" of I-285), even if it was only 5 miles away and their alternate suggestions were twice as far. They anything in the category of "OPT" as "far, far away."

That always puzzled me. Coming from Texas, anything within an hour's drive at non-stop highway speeds is "pretty close" to me. Half an hour away is "just up the road." A three or four hour drive (each way) still falls well within the bounds of a "day trip."
I hereby dub you an honorary Canadian.
 
When I was stationed in Atlanta on a project (back in my IT days), I encountered the mystical barrier known as I-285. When we would look for somewhere to go eat lunch or dinner, the locals I worked with would steadfastly refuse to journey "OTP" ("Outside the Perimeter" of I-285), even if it was only 5 miles away and their alternate suggestions were twice as far. They anything in the category of "OPT" as "far, far away."

That always puzzled me. Coming from Texas, anything within an hour's drive at non-stop highway speeds is "pretty close" to me. Half an hour away is "just up the road." A three or four hour drive (each way) still falls well within the bounds of a "day trip."
I have some relatives from Europe that just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we measure destinations by time rather than distance. How far is Toronto? About an hour. Not, for example, 90km. Everything is so far apart that nothing else makes sense, plus huge traffic differentials. Anyway, it's a thing.
 
I hereby dub you an honorary Canadian.

I'm honored!

I have been to Canada a number of times, and always enjoyed my trips there.

On one occasion I drove half of Nova Scotia, over the period of a week. I was always very amused by the billboards that were advertising tourist spots and restaurants in grand, exciting ways, often starting hundreds of miles away, only to find that they were very tiny little hole-in-the-wall places. I always wondered how they afforded so many billboards. I also learned pretty quickly that if something advertised gas and food 150 miles (in km, of course) up the road, that meant that there was nowhere else along the highway to buy gas and food until you reached that point.

The areas I was driving through were nowhere near the most remote parts of Canada, of course.
 
I have some relatives from Europe that just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we measure destinations by time rather than distance. How far is Toronto? About an hour. Not, for example, 90km. Everything is so far apart that nothing else makes sense, plus huge traffic differentials. Anyway, it's a thing.

Yep! I have also met people who don't understand that when we (here in Texas) talk about distance in terms of hours of driving, we usually mean at full speed on highways. "Four hours away" means four hours of driving on a highway at 60+ miles per hour, with maybe one or two quick bathroom breaks.
 
I'm honored!

I have been to Canada a number of times, and always enjoyed my trips there.

On one occasion I drove half of Nova Scotia, over the period of a week. I was always very amused by the billboards that were advertising tourist spots and restaurants in grand, exciting ways, often starting hundreds of miles away, only to find that they were very tiny little hole-in-the-wall places. I always wondered how they afforded so many billboards. I also learned pretty quickly that if something advertised gas and food 150 miles (in km, of course) up the road, that meant that there was nowhere else along the highway to buy gas and food until you reached that point.

The areas I was driving through were nowhere near the most remote parts of Canada, of course.
It's Canada man, we have nothing but real estate for surplus to requirements billboards, Not in Toronto maybe, but everywhere else? You get a billboard! And you get a billboard!! Everyone gets a billboard!!!

We are pretty nice though, but I'd say the same thing about almost every place I've been in the states. Minus New Jersey.
 
Spokane is made to run a Kult campaign in. It has a history of serial killers, sections that have loads of abandoned houses and buildings and big industrial complexes like hydroelectric dams and mines, as well as a bunch of old decommissioned nuclear launch silos.
Washington in general has a lot of great locations for any kind of contemporary setting. Need a laboratory? Try Hanford's nuclear reactor! It's where they built the first Nuclear Bombs. Cult or militia compounds? Try the north eastern section of the state, it's had plenty. Desert? We have it! Rainforest? We also have it!
Also Walla Walla has the largest collection of plastic live sized mules in the world. I don't know how you could fit that into a RPG, but here you go: https://www.fwwm.org/agriculture
 
It's Canada man, we have nothing but real estate for surplus to requirements billboards, Not in Toronto maybe, but everywhere else? You get a billboard! And you get a billboard!! Everyone gets a billboard!!!

We are pretty nice though, but I'd say the same thing about almost every place I've been in the states. Minus New Jersey.
I have been to Canada probably 30 times. It’s people are simply the warmest and friendliest in the whole world. The first time I went to Toronto (1990) my girlfriend and I sat with a Canadian couple at a Dinner Theatre that explained in intricate details that they were having a “test tube” baby and what that entails. The least friendly place I have ever been was Saint Petersburg, Russia . This was right after the wall fell and strangers were viewed with suspicion and occasional mockery. But once you got to know them they were like everyone else. The second coldest I have been treated was in NY state. My first day at work in Rochester, I showed up early during a heavy snow storm. There was young lady that was following me into the building so I held the door for her. She then informed me that women don’t “need” a man to hold the door open… runner up for most friendly goes to Italy. What magnificent people!
 
Hmm, interesting things around Portland Oregon. Well, one day I came out of work looked up and decided, no, that wasn't a forest fire, that was Mt. St. Helens spewing, turned on the radio, and sure enough that's what it was. Not the big one in 1980, a little cinder cone building exercise that started in 2004. I'm sure we have loads of interesting things, but I've not paid sufficient interest to them, and having grown up in Massachusetts not very much "old" stuff here (yea, I know even Massachusetts is "not old" compared to other parts of the world...).
 
Hmm, interesting things around Portland Oregon. Well, one day I came out of work looked up and decided, no, that wasn't a forest fire, that was Mt. St. Helens spewing, turned on the radio, and sure enough that's what it was. Not the big one in 1980, a little cinder cone building exercise that started in 2004.
Oregon's also got Mount Hood which for reasons I cannot fathom has been integrated into UFO lore.
 
That is fair. I’ve never been myself and I’ve lived in midTN since 1994.

I haven’t been to The Game Keep since Karl sold it. No issue with the owners, I barely made it up there once a year before and I used to part-time there.
Yep, I'd ride up every few months to spend some money. I liked Karl, an old curmudgeon like me. Ron and Brandy seem nice. I'd watched them over the past few years run Adventurer's League events off an on. They're remodeling the place which I think we can agree was in dire need of. Looking pretty good so far.
 
Spokane is made to run a Kult campaign in. It has a history of serial killers, sections that have loads of abandoned houses and buildings and big industrial complexes like hydroelectric dams and mines, as well as a bunch of old decommissioned nuclear launch silos.
Washington in general has a lot of great locations for any kind of contemporary setting. Need a laboratory? Try Hanford's nuclear reactor! It's where they built the first Nuclear Bombs. Cult or militia compounds? Try the north eastern section of the state, it's had plenty. Desert? We have it! Rainforest? We also have it!
Also Walla Walla has the largest collection of plastic live sized mules in the world. I don't know how you could fit that into a RPG, but here you go: https://www.fwwm.org/agriculture
Love the area around the Hoh River and Glacier. Awesome little rain forest with great looking trees. We took the kids camping there years ago. I'd love to live near there. I miss Washington.
 
When I was stationed in Atlanta on a project (back in my IT days), I encountered the mystical barrier known as I-285. When we would look for somewhere to go eat lunch or dinner, the locals I worked with would steadfastly refuse to journey "OTP" ("Outside the Perimeter" of I-285), even if it was only 5 miles away and their alternate suggestions were twice as far. They anything in the category of "OPT" as "far, far away."

(grins) The Mystical Barrier for Bostonians is Route 128, the nearer of two circumferential highways around the city ... all of a DOZEN miles from the downtown. The only thing I've ever encountered like is talking to Manhattan residents who never in their lives left the corporate boundaries of New York City.
 
Polar bears roam freely in and out of the city I live in.
I mean that in and of itself means you live in an interesting place. I get excited at the deer and eagles that occasionally visit my house. I get really excited if I see a beaver swim by. (And I mean the small mammal that builds dams ladies and gentlemen)
 
I have some relatives from Europe that just can't wrap their heads around the fact that we measure destinations by time rather than distance. How far is Toronto? About an hour. Not, for example, 90km. Everything is so far apart that nothing else makes sense, plus huge traffic differentials. Anyway, it's a thing.

Time and distance have a very nondeterministic relationship in much of Europe. In the Southeast of England, for example, if you tried to drive across country it would be an absolute crapshoot as to whether you spent half an hour negotiating a couple of traffic jams trying to get through small villages with medieval roads that are nowhere near fit for purpose. Even at the best of times you might be driving down narrow country roads and having to look out for some maniac coming the other way in a range rover or a giant tractor with a trailer loaded with hay bales. An A-road might be a dual carriageway or it might be a goat track.

And then there's the Swindon Magic Roundabout in M MongooseMatt's manor, presumably so named as the designer was on the same substances as the folks who wrote and directed its namesake.

swindon-magic-roundabout-1-1024x576.jpg


Even the motorways will jam up randomly. If somebody prangs their car the roads surrounding the motorway have nowhere near the capacity for people to avoid it, so not only does the motorway get jammed up all the surrounding roads get jammed up with people who saw the jam on google maps or heard about it on the radio and are now trying to avoid it.

Or, there's roadworks where they're frigging the road or digging it up to lay something under it. When I lived in Edenbridge, some people spent years laying fibre optic cable down the road from Oxted. There would be temporary traffic control set up on a stretch of road and barriers surrounding the worksite, but there was never actually anybody doing the work.

By and large there's no redundancy in the system due to it being stretched to begin with, so if anything does go pear shaped it goes pear shaped really badly. And that's before we get into trying to drive about London. The best thing I can say about driving in London is that it's not Jakarta and we can but thank the gods of Victorian town planning that London has a public transport system that actually works.
Most of the time.
 
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OMFG that rotary is insane. And I thought some of them in Massachusetts was bad.

Just to show how nature abhors that rotary, as I started typing this, an ant crawled dizzily across my monitor, merging into the flow of traffic. I am not making this up.
 
OMFG that rotary is insane. And I thought some of them in Massachusetts was bad.

Just to show how nature abhors that rotary, as I started typing this, an ant crawled dizzily across my monitor, merging into the flow of traffic. I am not making this up.
It's quite famous, possibly Swindon's best known landmark, although it's not the only magic roundabout of this sort in the UK.

To paraphrase Rainbow, (a contemporary of The Magic Roundabout), [Zippy's voice]: 'There were a lot of narcotics involved, Geoffrey.'
 
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European Pub-goers are at an unfair advantage in this thread.

Wait until we get more Asian Pub-goers, especially someone living in Jerusalem...:devil:

That’s the same here. In San Antonio not to far from here is a Spanish mission from the late 1750s. That as old as fabricated stuff gets around here. I told a buddy of mine in Hertfordshire about the mission and he said pish posh there’s a pub on his street older than that.

There was, well over a decade ago, a nationalist politician in my general area who reacted to some strong suggestions from Washington with "I don't accept advice (on historical issues) by a country that's younger than the stone fence behind my granny's house":shade:. Odds are very good that he was speaking literally, too.
The church I visited last month in my city was built in the early IV century, BTW.

OTOH, there are quite a few interesting places for gaming purposes that are newly-built. Hong Kong is one I can point to, despite being in Asia:thumbsup:.
 
(grins) The Mystical Barrier for Bostonians is Route 128, the nearer of two circumferential highways around the city ... all of a DOZEN miles from the downtown. The only thing I've ever encountered like is talking to Manhattan residents who never in their lives left the corporate boundaries of New York City.
I'm not sure I've ever dealt with enough actual Bostonians to perceive people seeing 128 as a barrier, but then I grew up 1/2 outside (Concord) and 1/2 just inside (Lexington). And my dad's parents were in Fitchburg so even 495 wasn't a barrier. On the other hand growing up we rarely went much further west until I started college in Troy NY (and I visited Amherst [for an SCA event] and Springfield [for a Boskone] from college).

Here in Portland OR, I have had high school youth group members who haven't been out of state despite being able to take a city bus out of state... And you'd think that we lived in the sticks despite being 5 minutes from downtown, though it's not as bad as when I lived a whopping 15 minutes from downtown... But a lot of that is because most Portlander's live East of the Willamette while I live West...
 
OMFG that rotary is insane. And I thought some of them in Massachusetts was bad.

Just to show how nature abhors that rotary, as I started typing this, an ant crawled dizzily across my monitor, merging into the flow of traffic. I am not making this up.
Yea, Massachusetts Death Circles (as a friend once referred to them as) are tame in comparison to THAT...

I do miss the taming of the one where Rte 2 ends in Cambridge... :-) I shocked my classmate from Bolton (I went to a Minuteman Voc Tech so HUGE area of draw) blasting through that at 45 on our way to some graduating class event...

Here in Portland, many of the rotaries are tamed with yield or stop signs on the entrances...

What people don't understand is that Massachusetts drivers aren't crazy, they're assertive. I'll never forget the reaction as I was driving my friend's minivan into Boston one time. He was in the back seat, another friend beside me. A light turned green. Passenger beside me gasped in horror. I asked what the problem was. Van owner called out from back seat "Nothing you just got the jump on a cabbie" in one of those "2 lanes merge into 1 on the other side of the intersection" situations Boston loves. Cabbie of course realizing I got the jump on him backed off immediately. Of course all of that is tame compared to driving other places. I've never driven in India, but watching rush hour traffic where lane markings are not really even suggestions is rather mesmerizing, and it all works with almost no collisions.
 
Today's plan had been a day out at the seaside town of whitby.

What a disaster. Crawling traffic, get there and the roads are choked, the car parks completely jammed with queues snaking out waiting to get in and the end result was rolling of eyes, checking a few more full car parks and try another town.

Had planned to get some pics of Whitby Abbey, inspiration for the Dracula novel, building dating back to 657AD according to Wikipedia.

Maybe next time
 
I live in Birmingham, UK, so one hour in one direction I can reach Shrewsbury, home of Cadfeal the 12th century detective monk. In an hour in another direction I can get to Warwick castle which demos jousting and medieval siege weapons on most weekends. Or I could go to Gloucester where the cathedral was used for some of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. Or I could hit one of the dozens of castles or manor houses open to the public, there are houses with moats and some with priest holes, for hiding your local Catholic from the dastardly Protestant scum. As well as the Black country museum there are two other open air museums locally, Blists Hill near Iron Bridge and Avoncroft in Bromsgrove.

One of my favourite odd places is on the way to Derby, there is a pumping station with a few massive beam engines that pumped the sewage from Burton upon Trent. A few times each year they fire them up and run them. These engine houses are the perfect local for a Victorian era set piece, the sight, sound, smell , size is wonderful.

Overall if you live in the middle of the UK you are overwhelmed with choice for RPG friendly locations to explore.
 
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