Beam Me Down Scotty

After finishing up the graffiti photo shoot we continued on into Bowman, the home of the UFO Welcome Center. We visited (AKA drove by) the place when we were in Bowman taking post office pictures back in 2007. Knowing that a roadside attraction might be worth a point in the Motoring Challenge, we thought we might drive by again and get a photo.

Trouble was we didn’t have the location of the Welcome Center. I seemed to remember that it was like one street of the main drag. Bowman ain’t that big, how hard could it be? US178 runs through it northwest to southeast and SC210 is perpendicular to that. There are maybe 6 streets each, parallel to those roads.

We had covered about half of our search area when I noticed a big blue water tower with TOWN OF BOWMAN painted with what looked like a house painting roller. To add extra interest, the tower was home to an very large flock of turkey vultures. We still needed a town that began with the letter B, so…

We never really paid any attention to water towers before, but ever since we needed a picture of one for the Motoring Challenge we realized they are everywhere. This got my weird little mind thinking, maybe we should use a water tower that has the town name on it for all of the challenge requirements. Donna said that maybe I shouldn’t make this any more difficult than it already is. I’ll work on her, if we do this again in 2016 that will be how we do it.

After taking the water tower photo we headed out of town towards home, when out of the corner of her eye, Donna saw the Welcome Center. We circled back to get a photo, but after seeing the structure, decided against it. It was very dilapidated and looked like it might fall down any minute. Looking through the Google Images of the thing though, it appears to have been in this same state for a lot longer than that time frame.

I searched the Life of Brian for the photo I was sure we took during our first visit, but can’t seem to find it. Thinking on it now, I bet I didn’t take a photo in 2007 for the same reason I didn’t take one last weekend, that thing is ugly.