Extra, extra! The Mysterious Loretto Staircase
Congratulations to my friends at Wikitravel, the awesome community-written- and maintained online travel guide. They have just launched the public beta of a major social networking addition to their project, called Extra, which makes it easier for Wikitravellers to connect with each other and share their ideas, pictures, opinions and personal anecdotes about their travel adventures, among other things.
One cool piece of functionality Extra has is the ability for users to import posts from their blogs. So this post is partly to allow me to check that out and give it a whirl.
I haven’t been doing much traveling lately, so I’ll have to dig into my archives…
Here’s something
If you ever go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and you like to visit to the offbeat or weird places when you travel like I do, don’t miss the Loretto Chapel, and its incredible spiral staircase. Many people consider it the result of a miracle. It has 33 steps and makes two complete 360-degree turns, without a center support. No nails were used. And the story behind its creation and creator is very odd.
The Chapel had been on my “Weird places to visit before I die” list for a long time, and I finally got to see it back in July of 2005, during a big summer road trip. You can’t walk on it these days, but I believe it was in daily use for many decades.
Definitely worth a look.