Some of the internet's best travel inspiration comes buried in oddball round-ups, and the latest from Messy Nessy Chic is a treasure chest. A few of the finds double as genuine reasons to plot a trip.
The standout is Cano's Castle in Antonito, a tiny town in Colorado's San Luis Valley. Dominic "Cano" Espinoza, a Vietnam veteran born in 1948, started building in 1980 with a steam room above a potato cellar and kept going for roughly two decades using whatever turned up — stone, scrap metal, wood sheathed in cut-off aluminium can bottoms, strings of bottles that chime in the wind. Influenced by the Buddhist temples he saw during the war, he calls the castle something built "for our religion," and he welcomes visitors: East 10th Avenue and State Street, essentially any day. He says the curious crowds are his energy.
Also worth folding into an itinerary: the Wenzel Hablik Museum in Itzehoe, in northern Germany, opened in 1995. Hablik, a Bohemia-born Expressionist who as a child imagined "magical castles and mountains" inside a crystal, filled the museum with his fantastical paintings and designs, plus his personal collections of crystals, minerals, seashells and snails. It's an easy add-on for anyone already heading to Hamburg or Schleswig-Holstein.
Closer to the ground in London, look up — or rather, look at bricked-up windows. The Georgian-era Window Tax charged households not by income but by how many windows a house had, since people considered declaring earnings an invasion of privacy. The workaround was simply blocking light out, and the sealed openings still scar façades across England, France and Ireland. A photography project called Daylight Robbery documents London's surviving examples and frames the whole thing as a story about how much light and air matter in the places we live.
For a different kind of detour, photographer Sasha Maslov's series Ukrainian Railroad Ladies portraits the women who work as crossing guards and safety officers from tiny trackside huts across Ukraine — images with a distinctly Wes Anderson symmetry, and a quiet record of a profession that has barely changed while the country around it has.
The rest of the round-up is more armchair than airplane, but fun trivia for the road: Victorian London's 1890s "Pluto Lamps" were streetlamps that also dispensed hot coffee, cocoa, tea, beef water, cigarettes and postcards — until people twigged that any round bit of metal worked in the coin slots and the whole scheme collapsed. And for most of the 20th century, shoe shops in Europe and America used fluoroscopes that X-rayed customers' feet inside their shoes so everyone could watch toes wiggle; the machines hung on until the 1970s before health concerns finally killed them off.
Who's this for? Travellers who like the strange margins — folk-art castles, tax-avoidance architecture, one-woman rail crossings — more than headline sights. Each item here is a small excuse to add an odd stop to an ordinary route.
