explore everywhere

In the past few years, I’ve crossed off more than a few bucket list travel spots. Two bigs ones being Roswell and most recently, Salem. Both places, although very different, I love for the same reason. They’ve embraced their pasts and in turn, become kitschy as all heck. Roswell is covered in aliens, even places like the local furniture store have alien decor. Similarly, Salem has something witch-related every way you turn! Witches don’t interest me the way that aliens do but it still ranked pretty high on my list of must-visit cities.

Salem was just as lovely as I imagined. Witches everywhere! It was such a sweet, little walkable city. We left our hotel early in the morning and explored Salem before it really got busy for the day. We wandered the streets, peeking in storefronts that weren’t open yet, grabbed a coffee and headed toward the one thing I really wanted to check out on our short visit – The Burying Point. One of the oldest cemeteries in the US and the oldest one in Salem!

I was a little nervous about the small cemetery being busy. Even if you’re not the kind of person who visits cemeteries while on vacation, The Burying Point would probably still be somewhere you’d visit while in Salem. Being an earlier riser certainly has its perks though! We were the only people around aside from some construction workers across the street.

Each headstone was more beautiful than the last! It killed me to have to stay on the path (although I do understand the reasoning in such a high traffic cemetery.) Being from the midwest, where our cemeteries aren’t that old and definitely don’t have as interesting headstones, I still freak out over headstones with skulls. I enjoyed every second of our visit.

Beside the main cemetery is the Salem Witch Trials Memorial. Built in 1992, the memorial consists of 20 granite benches dedicated to the victims of the Salem witch trials. Each states the victim’s name, the date of their death, and how they died. We visited these a little bit later in the day when the city was much busier. People filed through the memorial, briefly glancing at each inscription. There were flowers on each of the benches and other small trinkets throughout (including a Reese’s Cup! Why a Reese’s Cup!?) There was a much more somber vibe here than in the cemetery, despite only being a few feet away.

So hard to believe the Salem Witch Trials were something that really happened. Giles Corey, whose memorial is pictured below, is especially hard to fathom. Retelling history isn’t exactly my forte, so instead, I’ll point you to his Wiki page. Yikes.

I wish we had spent more time in Salem. I certainly wouldn’t mind going back and actually checking out all the museums and shops. I definitely still consider our visit a success though. Coffee, a beautiful cemetery, a souvenir t-shirt from a bike shop (it has a witch on a bike!!!) and some of the most delicious macarons I’ve ever eaten.

Until next time, Salem!
xoxo

More from this trip –

▴ Three days in New England

▴ Ponyhenge

The very last stop on our epic family roadtrip / destination wedding adventure was easily one of my favorites. It’s hard to say something is your favorite when you literally just got married a few days earlier and spent a whole bunch of time with the people most important to you. So, let’s call this my favorite aside from the things that basically automatically get ‘favorite’ status. Although, one could argue an old cemetery complete with friendly livestock grazing inside automatically ranks up there as well.

This was another FindAGrave app find. Just like our previous stop, we were all hankering for a place to stretch our legs and explore. I browsed Roadside America but didn’t find anything that looked interesting on our route so I turned to my second app of choice, FindAGrave. The reason I always say it’s not the best is because of the limited information it gives on places. It’s nice for locating cemeteries but who really knows if it’s going to be worth checking out or not. I decided it was worth the gamble since it wasn’t too far off the highway in the direction we were heading.

We arrived at the address only to see it was wooded, gated, not visible from the road and presumably, up a bumpy looking dirt road. Worse than that was that, there was someone at the gate closing it up. We pulled into the large pull off area in front of the gate and asked ‘Is the cemetery up there?’ hoping if he had some sort of authority he’d say it was okay if we poked around. He cheerily responded that yeah, it was up there, the road was driveable, he was just visiting his grandparents, to make sure to close the gate behind us and to have fun!

We crept up the dirt trail in our rental cars. After going through a second gate, we entered the cemetery. I could immediately see that it was going to be a good one. Then I spotted why there were so many gates and why it was so important to keep them closed! A beautiful cow was grazing alongside the graves. I’m not sure if there were more but I was excited just to see her. It was a really beautiful sight, and of course, I’m always excited to see animals. I was also very happy we’d been dragging around the 70-200mm lens. I was able to get some nice close up without disturbing her.

After getting my shots of the seemingly random cemetery cow, I started to wander around the rest of the grounds. It seemed like everywhere I looked there was something that got me all excited. One of the things I loved most was the huge range of different grave marker types. The whole thing was the complete opposite of the uniformity most cemeteries have. There were crosses made from pipes, headstones that appeared to be stamped somehow, metal crosses, and of course, your classic granite obelisk among many other unique one of a kind things I’d have trouble even describing.

Thurber Cemetery has a ton of history, and what makes it most interesting is that they have signs scattered about with little factoids. Instead of being dry and boring, they were actually fairly humorous. Clearly written by someone with a lot of opinions – check out the one a few photos below. “idiotic cemetery restoration attempt…” 

I hesitate to describe a cemetery as ‘fun’ but I’m having a hard time thinking of any other descriptor that works as well or sums up my feeling on it. There was a cow, there were cactus, a little bit of every type of grave marker you could think of, and interesting information sprinkled throughout. I loved Thurber Cemetery. I’m really glad we got off the highway to check it out!
xoxo

More from this trip;
▴ just married!
▴ instant photos from our wedding week
▴ that time I got married in a ghost town
▴ Cadillac Ranch
▴ Boothill Graveyard
▴ Twin Arrows + Two Guns
▴ Steins Cemetery
▴ abandoned motel in New Mexico

Clearly, it needs updated since in the two years after hitting publish I’ve found many others I LOVE but I have a list of my top ten cemeteries!

The FindAGrave app isn’t perfect but it did lead me here and that definitely counts for something!

Normally the drive back from anywhere feels so much shorter because you have whatever you did to occupy your mind. This definitely should have been the case, since Jeff and I had just gotten married a few short days earlier, buuut the drive from Phoenix back to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was long. LONG. Loooong. I guess what made it feel so long was that we knew we were on a tight-ish schedule. There was time to explore but at the same time, we all just really wanted to get some miles behind us so that it didn’t seem quite so daunting. Fifteen and a half hours is a lot of time in the car!

It had only been a few hours since our detour to Tombstone, AZ but we were all ready to find somewhere to stop again. This will be a repeating theme throughout the rest of the posts I have from our drive after the wedding. I love long car rides but what’s the fun if you’re not stopping every twenty minutes to check out things along the side of the road and take photos?! Luckily, my husband and my parents feel the same way.

I haven’t been to too many of them, but I’m hooked on desert cemeteries. On any road trip, I’m going to make an effort to find interesting cemeteries but in the desert my need to find them is even more intense. The FindAGrave app showed Steins Cemetery coming up, it looked pretty small. Only 24 memorials are listed but the three small thumbnails in the app looked promising. I was stoked from the second we pulled up! It was beautiful! Okay, maybe not everyone’s vision of a beautiful cemetery but the absolute perfect desert cemetery. A strange variety of memorial types – flat stones, crumbling concrete crosses, and small wooden planks – all weathered by the hot sun. No two headstones were the same, and most weren’t even remotely similar to the ones beside it. It was an interesting hodgepodge of styles, for sure!

The cemetery is small but an excellent place to stop, stretch your legs, and of course, poke around a bit. There’s even a geocache right outside the cemetery! Here are five reasons to start geocaching, if you haven’t already.

More from this trip;
▴ just married!
▴ instant photos from our wedding week
▴ that time I got married in a ghost town
▴ Cadillac Ranch
▴ Boothill Graveyard
▴ Twin Arrows + Two Guns