It’s my first full day in Florida as an almost-domiciled-here person, so I did a little sightseeing to get to know my new state. The canoe and kayak area at this park looked lovely… … until I saw the sign warning that alligators have been spotted here. Uh, no thanks on that kayak trip, guys. The sun was out this morning after a big rainstorm overnight, but by noon, the temperatures were dropping and the clouds were rolling in. Before it got too cold (OK, it was down to 45F and I think that is cold considering I am in…
Month: January 2018
Weekly Update: Jan 10, 2018
Things are moving along in my trip from California to Florida. This week, I stayed in five different places and learned that Texas is a freaking huge state. And that there are at least six different ways to get anywhere, depending on how long you want to take. I usually opted for a combination of fast driving (interstate highways) some of the time, and scenic drives (back roads, like Farm Market and County roads) for the rest. Wed night: Fort Stockton. I was originally going to camp out at the local Walmart in town, but temps predicted to be below…
Sunday Serenity: Sound
After five hours in the car, driving across the middle of Texas, the last sound I wanted to hear was traffic after I pulled into my campsite at Galveston Island State Park. So I walked away from the road and out onto the beach. Ah, the Gulf Coast is glorious, even when the sun is well-hidden behind the clouds. The waves are endless and they create a natural noise that drowns out everything else. These two old men passed me, the sounds of a lively conversation reaching me over the surf. I loved the image of them so much I…
Black and White
It’s kind of a bleak weather weekend for many people in the US: cold, snow, and more cold. It’s warmed up in Texas, hitting 50F as I walked around Canyon Lake today. The drowned trees (this is a Corps of Engineers dammed lake) fascinated me and so that’s what I had fun with today, both in the taking and in the post-processing. That old-school Minolta lens I’ve been using has a much smaller field than the wide-angle I’m used to, so learning to compose shots within its field of view has been an interesting set of lessons the last month…
Weekly Update: Jan 3, 2018
Three days into the new year, and so far, so good! I ushered in the New Year at a quiet campground in New Mexico. How quiet? No fireworks, no loud parties, just a big old moon (and later, Orion overhead) to usher in 2018. It was lovely. Wednesday and Thursday nights: Plomosa BLM, Quartzsite AZ was a beautiful stop and pretty well deserted the last few days of 2017. That’s my tiny trailer with no one around me for at least a quarter-mile 🙂 I was fighting back a cold so two days of desert air with lots of sleep…