Fort Lupton is a city of eight thousand on the dry plains north of Denver.

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Without irrigation, no crops would grow in the dry plains of south-western New South Wales, where the Murrumbidgee meets the Murray.

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" And in the coming months, the president would tell the nation that he, too, had read of the Joads' journey from the bone-dry plains of Oklahoma to the bountiful lands of California, where they and others toiled away for a pittance and found themselves wishing "them big farmers wouldn' plague us so.

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Stony ridges rise up from ravines, dry riverbeds and hardly vegetated plains, and curl around each other.

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So, with meticulous organisation, Givens, a retired heart surgeon, plans to return to the land of his birth, east of the mountains that separate the coastal plains around Seattle from the brittle, dry sagelands beyond, and stage a shooting accident.

ECONOMIST: Nostalgia fiction

El Castillo de Buen Amor (the Castle of Good Love) may be about the least martial name ever conceived for a fortress, but in truth this place in the plains north of Salamanca was designed more for pleasure, despite its crenellations, impressively bulky walls and (dry) moat.

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