WOMAN Challenge: Update

I have just arrived at Goldfield, Nevada, in my virtual trip across the country. In non-virtual terms, I’ve walked (or exercised the equivalent) about ten miles. Not a lot, but perhaps a bit more than I would have done if I hadn’t been trying to make my goal each day.

This afternoon, for instance, my son asked to go to the park. Rather than sitting on a bench reading a book while he played, as I usually would, I walked in a large circuit around the field containing the playground. On my second time around, he decided to join me, and together we logged another one thousand steps.

(This choice of exercise also led to an interesting encounter. I found a cell phone in the grass, and proceeded to go around the playground asking if anyone had lost a phone. When I couldn’t find its owner, I tried going through the list of contacts, and tried called “Home Love.” As soon as I mentioned a cell phone to the man who answered, he told me I was calling from his cell phone, which he had been looking for all over the house and car. We met at the Burger King where the boys and I were having supper, and chatted for a while. Like my husband, he previously pastored a church, but things did not work out. Currently he and his wife are doing “home church” with their children – the oldest of whom is five.)

Since my younger son and I have been playing “Where in the U.S. is Carmen Sandiego?” (the board game, not the computer game) to learn geography (and have fun), I decided I ought to learn more about the places I’m “visiting” on my cross country trip. Goldfield, I discovered, was a boom town early in the twentieth century. It grew very fast once gold was discovered, then dwindled almost as quickly when the gold ran out.

Today it is mostly a ghost town, though a few hundred residents still live there, and several owners have tried to renovate the posh hotel in hopes of reviving the town. The hotel is supposedly haunted, the most famous ghost being that of a prostitute whom the owner of the hotel got pregnant and then probably murdered, together with her baby. You can learn more about the town and the hotel at Legends of America.