November 2, 2022

Paradise Again

By roads-rus

I did towns named Paradise on May 4, 2022, with towns named Utopia. I decided to research it again since I mentioned Paradise, California, recently and decided I did not do Paradise justice as a town name. I began doing research and discovered a number of towns with this name all over the United States. There are said to be 27 of them! The largest Paradise was in California.

But then I made a list of states’ names with town in them called Paradise and realized that most of them are either unincorporated or are very, very small. There has to be a better way of recording their names on the internet because there are not enough big Paradises around.

I only found 5 on my maps that are of real consequence as towns and one of them is the town of Paradise Valley, a suburb of Phoenix, AZ that is home to about 13,000 people. I was shocked to see a Paradise of 223,167 people in the state of Nevada. I quickly realized that there is a large town named Paradise in the Las Vegas area. It seems to encompass its airport that recently received a new name to honor Harry Reid. McCarran is no longer the name of its international airport. This airport is indeed in that part of Las Vegas known as Paradise.

Paradise, CA is rebuilding after a disastrous fire that destroyed the entire town. It had been a town of 26,000 before the fire that was caused by a glitch in the way electricity was generated. It was called the Camp Fire.

I found a legitimate Paradise in Pennsylvania with 1,129 people near Lancaster and was not surprised by a town with this name in a part of the country with so many Amish people around. My atlas recorded 2 towns named Paradise in Utah but I could only find one of them. It was a town of fewer than 1000 people near Brigham City. That was it. The rest of the Paradises were exceedingly small. The town named Paradise in Kansas, for example, had a population of only about 50 people and was north of another small town named Russell, population about 4,500, that at least had a county named for it. Paradise, Kentucky, was at one time a trading post on the Green River despite flooding and had a song by John Prine written about it. Its post office officially closed for good in 1967, and it was no longer on my map of Kentucky even though its county called Muhlenberg was clearly visible. Whatever happened to the Paradises in Oregon and Ohio? There still appears to be a Paradise in the Virgin Islands, which sort of makes sense.

We need a better system of recording obscure and tiny towns with recognizable names.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 at 9:42 pm and posted in Great City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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