Silver and Gold

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DSCF2721FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/125 sec, ISO200)

We don’t plan our vacations in the USA months in advance. We have an idea about the route. We book the car and the hotel for the first night. The rest we decide when we are there.

It worked very good so far though I need to admit that not all decisions are good ones. When we were on our way back to Arizona we knew that Tucson and Phoenix were out of reach because we stayed up long after the White Sands NM visit. So we needed a place to stay in-between Alamogordo and Tucson. Purely based on its adventurous sounding name we decided for Sliver City.

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 DSCF2710FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/80 sec, ISO200)

Silver City! What a name! Close you eyes and you can see Cowboys, horses and saloons. Just real Wild West. Open your eyes and you see abandoned streets and closed shops. Not the prefect place for a little walk in the sunset. But what do we Europeans know? So we walked the daunting empty streets of the old city center.

A police car drove by but it still didn’t feel save. It was the other way around. We walked a couple of blocks but we didn’t find another person or an open shop.

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Then we saw a small group of young men on our side of the street. They looked somehow strange so we decided to cross the road. When this truck passed by and they people inside shouted something at us that we didn’t understand we had enough. We went back to our car and back to the main road with our hotel, the fast food restaurants, walmart and the other shops. It felt much better there.

Maybe we overreacted. The combination of empty streets. Nobody on the road but police or old pickup trucks. Nobody walked around except a small group of strange looking youngsters. Most likely we over overreacted but you never know. Better safe than sorry they say.

But the golden light was fantastic!

DSCF4081FUJIFILM X-Pro1 (107.3mm, f/10, 1/125 sec, ISO200)
 DSCF2755FUJIFILM X-T1 (14mm, f/8, 1/320 sec, ISO200)