Long Overdue

July 1, 2012 Tom Dills 6 Comments

Kathy & I had been trying to find a weekend to head to Waynesville, NC – our favorite little town in the NC mountains – since March. With the exception of our Alaska and California adventure, things just haven’t been very conducive to getting away for the last several months. We finally had our chance this past weekend and took advantage.

As luck would have it we didn’t get a lot of relief from the high temperatures, as Waynesville – while about 10 degrees cooler than Charlotte – was still unseasonably hot, to the point where most of the HVAC systems were doing their best to keep up. Most of them were up to the task, a few were not.

We wisely headed out early and got our in-town sightseeing done early. In the heat of the afternoon we headed up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a few hours, and while it was 97 in town, it was an unusually warm but relatively cool 84 at Waterrock Knob, an overlook and visitor center at 5,820 feet. After a stop for ice cream it was back to town for a nice dinner and some rest in our thankfully-air-conditioned room.

Sunday was spent getting back to reality, and after a stop in Statesville here we are. A couple of work days with a holiday sandwiched in, and before we know it we’ll have another weekend!

No serious photography this trip, but I had a camera with me at just about all times!

Photography, Travel

July 2012 Wallpaper

July 1, 2012 Tom Dills

This photo is all about “HOT” to me. And wow, is it hot! We made plans to escape to the mountains for the weekend, and while it is maybe 10 degrees cooler, it’s still HOT!

Hopefully July will moderate a bit, but for now, we have heat aplenty. Enjoy this wallpaper for the month, and we’ll see what August brings.

Photography, Travel

Wine Country!

June 24, 2012 Tom Dills 7 Comments

This vacation was our first visit to California, so naturally our visit to California’s Wine Country was our first visit there as well. It was something we had been planning for a long, long time and as we sailed back to San Francisco from Alaska we were very anxious to get the next step of our vacation started!

Once we disembarked our cruise ship in San Francisco on Wednesday morning our first order of business was to get a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental car. This was sort of bass-ackwards as the airport was the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but that turned out to be the cheapest place to rent a car. Plus we wanted to be able to drop the car off at the airport on our return as it was much more convenient. After an exciting ride with a Greek cab driver (You like my driving, no?”) we made it safely to the airport and navigated the rail system to the rental car desk. Soon we had our car and were back on the road.

We had Wednesday afternoon, all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday for our adventure, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our first order of business after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was to locate Highway 1 and head toward the coast. Our intention was to stop at Muir Woods National Monument, but for some reason the place was packed – on a Wednesday! The main parking lot was full, the over flow parking was full, and the overflow for the overflow parking was full and people were parking on the road. We decided to drive on, and people were parked along the road for nearly a mile from the entrance. We hadn’t done any research ahead of time, so maybe the place is always that crowded. I’d sure hate to go there on a weekend if it is even busier. Amazing! We’ll have to do that another time.

After a brief stop at the Muir Beach overlook to get a view of the Pacific Ocean from the land side, we headed on North along Highway 1. What a view! Nothing like we get along the East Coast, that’s for sure. We stopped at a little restaurant in the town of Stinson Beach for lunch, then headed inland toward Santa Rosa, where our hotel was located.

We knew that with nearly 4 days, we would have plenty of time but we also knew that we had a lot to see. We also decided that we didn’t want to have a “death march” through wine country, although how hard is drinking wine, right? Seriously though, this was less about seeing how many wineries we could visit or how much wine we could drink and more about seeing the countryside, exploring side roads and having plenty of time to enjoy our time there.

We had started planning our visit several months in advance, and with the invaluable advice and assistance of our good friend Jon Dressler of Dressler’s Restaurants in Charlotte, we had arranged private tours of 4 wineries. Two of our tours were on Thursday and two were on Friday, with one tour each morning and one tour each afternoon. We purposely left Saturday completely open in order to see what else we wanted to do. As it turned out we used Saturday to visit Napa, as none of the wineries we visited were located there. We had an 11:00 flight on Sunday, so that day would be spent solely on travel.

We used the four scheduled tours as the framework for our visit, and I think it worked out very well. We got an early start each day in order to have as much “piddle time” as possible with plenty of time to get to our first destination. We left time between tours for lunch, with plenty of time to drive to our afternoon destination. Our standard practice after the second tour of the day was to head back to our hotel, make a dinner reservation on Open Table, then take a nap. Like I said, no Death Marches for us!

Three things stand out to me from our visit:

(1) Distinctive geography – we always hear about the differences in climate, soil and terrain and how those differences affect the grapes and ultimately the taste of the wine. It’s one thing to hear, but to actually the area is to appreciate the descriptions. When someone describes a wine as coming from grapes “planted on a steep mountainside at 2500 feet” or coming from “the sandy and rocky soil of the Carneros Valley, it really drives home the distinctions that each area has to offer.

(2) Each winery has its own very distinctive character, from the style of the building, the layout of the winemaking area to the design of the bottles and labels. What I love about this is that it really allows us to enjoy the wine as a unique statement of everything that goes into the product. Each bottle is a representative of the winery, since every decision about every ingredient and every step of the process has some kind of an impact on the final result. Just like photography, everyone starts with the same basic set of tools but ends up with their unique expression of those tools.

(3) Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, is the amount of passion that people have for their business, from the winemakers to the tasting room people to the staff in the restaurants we visited. The people we encountered were visibly passionate about their work, and that passion is contagious. This made visiting the wineries, dining at the restaurants, and generally visiting the area a very pleasurable experience.

I’m going to have more to say about our experience in future posts, but the time since we’ve returned has slipped by in a hurry. I wanted to get this post wrapped up so I can “put a bow” on the overview and get back to some specific commentary about other parts of our vacation. Hopefully this collection of photos will provide a bit of a sampler of the 4 days we spent in wine country.

Photography, Travel

Victoria, BC

June 17, 2012 Tom Dills 9 Comments

For a lot of cruisers, Victoria is little more than a fuel stop and a way for the cruise line to comply with the Jones Act (also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920) that, among other things specifies that a foreign-flagged vessel operating out of a US port must call at a non-US port before disembarking passengers back in the US port. It makes things a bit more complicated and interesting for cruises originating from a US port and going to places like Alaska and Hawaii.

Situated on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which interestingly the city of Vancouver is not on, Victoria is the capital of British Columbia. The locals say that on a clear day you can see across the channel to the Seattle area, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades and Mount Rainier. I’ll take their word for it! We could barely see the water, let alone the US, it was so rainy and cloudy. No problem, though. We were going to see a castle!

Our tour started, ominously enough, with a visit to the highest point in Victoria, Mt. Tolmie. But the peak was socked in with clouds and rain, so other than a few photos of blurry yellow flowers and some wet rocks, there wasn’t much to see or photograph. We spend some time driving through town and looking at the sights of Victoria through raindrops on our bus windows, so not many photo ops there!

Craigdarroch Castle is an interesting attraction, and its history is full of intrigue, family feuds and probably some steamy romance. Check the website for details! Located in a residential neighborhood, buses are not allowed to come to the castle, so we were dropped off a few blocks away and walked there through a very nice neighborhood. We didn’t have time for a leisurely walk because we were late for our scheduled arrival, plus it was raining (still) and we wanted to get to the shelter of the castle. That sounds so romantic!

The castle was fairly dark and full of people, so my photography there was rather limited and shot at a pretty high ISO (thank you 5D Mark III!). I don’t think there’s much here that I’ll frame and put on the wall, but we’ll certainly have a few frames to remember our visit. The furniture was beautiful and the woodwork was extraordinary, most of it original but some of it added recently during renovation.

Our visit to downtown Victoria was complicated by the fact that it was Victoria Day – British Columbia’s version of Memorial Day – and downtown was rather congested due to closed streets for a parade. And it was raining pretty steadily, so except for a few grab shots from the sidewalk outside our bus, I don’t have much to show. It’s definitely a place I’d like to return to and spend some time, hopefully in better weather.

I’ve reached the end of the cruise portion of our vacation, so I’ll start shortly posting about our visit to wine country. I think I have more to write about our visit than I have photos, and I haven’t decided exactly how I want to present it, but I’ll be working on that soon. It’s been fun reliving our vacation, and I hope those following along have enjoyed the recollection of it as much as I have!

Photography

Ketchikan

June 13, 2012 Tom Dills 4 Comments

On our first visit to Ketchikan several years ago we did a boat tour around the area to look at “Lighthouses, Totems & Eagles” then we took in the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show. Kathy wanted to see the lumberjacks, and I wanted to see Annie Oakley.

For our day in Ketchikan this time we decided to try a boat tour to Misty Fjords National Monument. Dubbed “Yosemite of the North” for its similar geology, many of the glacial valleys are filled with sea water and are called “canals”, but they are not man-made in any way; the walls of these valleys are near-vertical and often rise 2,000 to 3,000 feet above sea level, and in some places drop 1,000 feet below it.

We sailed about the ‘St. Nona,’ one of several vessels operated by Allen Marine Tours, a family-owned tour company and one of the longest running operators in Alaska.

One of the landmarks of Misty Fjords is New Eddystone Rock, which is actually a pillar of basalt that came from fractures in the floor of Behm Canal in the last 5 million years. The broken, haphazard texture of these basalts indicates that New Eddystone Rock was part of a volcanic vent where magma rose repeatedly to the surface of the earth.

After returning from our adventure we took some time to explore the shops on Creek Street, which at one time housed the “red light district” of Ketchikan but that now takes your money in different and possibly more legal ways. We bought a few genuine Alaskan souvenirs then set out in search of ice cream. Amazingly we came up empty-handed. Not to say that there is no ice cream shop in Ketchikan, just that we didn’t find one. Hmmm, could be a business opportunity!

The next time we go to Ketchikan I think I’ll plan to spend some more time exploring the area right around the town. There were a number of commercial areas that were too far for us to walk in the short time we had, some that might be good places for lunch and some more genuine Alaskan handicrafts and art. That’s one of the problems with being on someone else’s schedule – so much to see, so little time!

Photography, Travel

More About That Boat

June 12, 2012 Tom Dills 5 Comments

Questionable Boat in the Ketchikan, Alaska Harbor

Several people commented about the boat I used to illustrate my last post, and as it turns out I had taken some other photos of it but hadn’t gone back and looked at the rest of that day’s photos until yesterday. I thought it would be amusing to post a few more. I can’t imagine that the person who owns this boat pays dock fees for it, so I can only guess that he works for the marina or for one of the tour boats that operates from there. Hopefully he doesn’t have far to travel.

I don’t know much about boats but I don’t think this one would pass a Coast Guard inspection.

I’m slowly catching up on my processing after a momentary slowdown. Stay tuned for some better subject matter very soon!

Photography, Travel

Attitude Adjustment

June 9, 2012 Tom Dills 7 Comments

Scrap pile behind the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show in Ketchikan, Alaska

At work the other morning, someone asked me how I was doing. She was somewhat taken aback when I replied that I was doing “fantastic.” She looked at me like I had just spoken to her in Swahili. I then said that having just gotten back from a 2-week vacation that I was loving life, even though the benefit of the time off was quickly fading. Cue the “must be nice,” “wish I had your money,” I could never take 2 weeks,” etc., etc., etc. commentary. Then she said something about “coming back to this place” to which I replied that I would gladly come back to work in order to be able to do another vacation like I just did, that I thought it was a fair trade. More Swahili.

We all know and work with people who are, let’s say, “happiness challenged.” Not that they are depressed or anything – although it’s possible that some of them are – but mostly they just spend a lot of time with negative attitudes – toward work, their spouse, their kids, their cars, etc. And they’re not too shy to talk about it. But that attitude carries over to how they live their lives, to the point where, for many people, they don’t seem to have the ability to understand the concept of doing things that make them happy. Sometimes I meet up with friends for lunch or dinner, and way too often all they do is complain about things.

We all have stuff that makes us angry or drives us crazy. But I have come to the conclusion – and this was a long time coming – is that it is not all of these outside things that bother me and make me crazy. It is my reaction to those things that makes them intolerable. So I’ve been working really hard at managing my own attitude, and I’ve found that it really helps. Don’t like the way people are driving? Back off and think about something else. Don’t like your cube neighbor’s Polka ringtone on his cell phone? Laugh it off. Neighbor’s dog barking endlessly while they are away? I haven’t solved that one yet, so I just turn up the music. Blue jeans in the cruise ship dining room? Whatever! I can’t change any of it, so fix the things I can fix, and for those things I can’t fix, I accept them and move on. Works for me.

The great thing about taking a vacation is that it does tend to put things in perspective. There’s a lot more to life than work, and there is way more to life than finding things to complain about. So look for the positives! While coming home and going back to work can be difficult, I would gladly trade a few months’ work in order to take another nice vacation. It’s a worthwhile trade.

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One of the best sayings I saw or heard on our trip to Alaska: “There is no such thing as inclement weather, only inappropriate clothing.” That pretty much says it!

Photography, Travel

Glacier Bay

June 6, 2012 Tom Dills 10 Comments

Our day in Glacier Bay was my single best day, photographically, in a long, long time. I don’t know if that is a result of the place being so photogenic, or the fact that I was prepared for my time there, with my only goal for the day to make photographs. It’s probably a combination of the two, since Glacier Bay is certainly an amazing place and I found it quite inspirational on my first visit several years ago. I have to imagine that what I experienced was a confluence of my own openness to the place and the renewed inspiration I felt from being there.

The Tourist Approach would be to slap a wide angle lens on the camera and shoot the huge expanse of icebergs, blue water and glaciers. But what I was feeling was more intimate, although even with a 400mm lens, the actual slice of landscape I captured was still quite large. The scale of the place never ceases to amaze me.

One of the most striking things about being in Glacier Bay aboard a cruise ship is how quiet everything becomes. They mercifully turn off the sound on the outdoor “Movies Under The Stars” entertainment system (it’s just a big television), the ship slows to maneuvering speed, and except for a few comments from the onboard naturalist, the place is silent. And I crave silent. Silent makes me happy.

Only one ship at a time is allowed in each area of the park, which is huge (3.3 million acres!) with several “inlets,” so the captain is able to essentially stop the in front of the glaciers, and when the ship moves from one place to another it does so slowly, barely creating a wake. The slower movement of the ship makes using a tripod very easy, both for composition and for holding the camera still. People ask me why I use a tripod on a moving ship, but it really does make a difference. Other than a couple of videographers, mine was the only tripod I saw on board the entire cruise.

I scouted ahead of time and found a great spot on the aft of the ship that had good, unobstructed views, access to both sides of the ship and had enough room to get out of the way. You would think that, with 2000 people on a ship in a place like Glacier Bay it would be crowded, but except for the time in front of the major glaciers and the times when they were giving away free hot chocolate on deck (there are always crowds around Free Food) I had the place pretty much to myself. Most of the people hung out in the center of the ship, closer to the pools, the restrooms and the bars. Silly me, the bars!

The onboard naturalist told us that one of her most frequently asked questions was, “what’s the best side of the ship to be on to see wildlife?” To which she replies, “the OUTSIDE!” She also stated that wildlife watching involved a lot of wildlife “waiting.” But amazingly, most people didn’t like the idea of waiting. I saw dozens of seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises and whales, and often I was the only person around to see them. Once in a while someone would walk by, see all my gear and ask me if I had seen any whales. When I replied that I had, they looked at me like they thought I was lying. Most of them were too far away to take photos of them, but they were still fun to watch through my binoculars.

Even on a ship large enough to hold 2000 passengers – small by modern cruise ship standards – I was struck by the enormous scale of the landscape and how small I felt within it, the ability for it to remain relatively undisturbed and how quiet it was.

My personal favorite photos from the day are the abstracts. They really speak to the quiet and calm I felt that day. I seem to have a thing for moving water, and some of the patterns are simply spectactular. I’m thrilled that the photos reflect them so well. I also enjoyed finding patterns in the glaciers and on the mountainsides along our route. Again, the relatively slow speed made for some pretty easy composition, although I did find that I had to “lead” the scene just a bit in places. All I did there was to keep the panning knob within easy reach, so that once I had the composition framed up and level, I could just pan the camera just a bit as needed.

One of the funny things about being an obviously serious photographer on a cruise ship is that people always ask me to take their pictures. I always oblige, although Kathy often handles that task so I can keep making my own pictures. What was really funny was that I think every one of the ship’s photographers took our picture at some point during the day. They knew we would understand that they had a count to make and almost looked like they wanted to apologize for it. We didn’t buy any of their photos but it was interesting to see the difference in composition and framing between the different photographers. Good photos, reluctant subjects!

Travel

Skagway

June 3, 2012 Tom Dills 5 Comments

I suppose the port areas that the typical cruise ship passengers see are about as “Alaskan” as the Caribbean cruise ports are “Caribbean.” It’s possible to find actual native art, handcrafts and souvenirs, but you have to really look. My impression of Skagway is that it might be a little more “Alaskan” than some of the other places we visited, but that is only my impression. There were still the usual “Ship Recommended” stores, but based on my research those weren’t the places you were going to get the real deal.

Broadway Street in Skagway with a view of the surrounding mountains

We started our day with a ride aboard the White Pass & Yukon Railroad. A 110-mile railroad line originally constructed in 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush, it is now operated as a scenic railway constructed along the original gold rush route. Our tour covered only the first 20 miles of the route, to a turnaround point at the US-Canada border. It was a very interesting 20 miles, however, as the WP&YR climbs almost 3000 feet in just 20 miles and features steep grades of up to 3.9%, cliff-hanging turns of 16 degrees, two tunnels and numerous bridges and trestles. The steel cantilever bridge was the tallest of its kind in the world when it was constructed in 1901.

Aboard the White Pass & Yukon Railway in Skagway, Alaska

Since we were early in the season I knew that we would see snow, but I was not prepared for just how much snow we would see! In some places near the White Pass Summit the snow was as high as the train cars. They told us that the railroad owns a rotary snow plow – which we later saw in town – that had been restored as a showpiece but that had been put into service this winter to keep the tracks cleared. That snow will mostly be gone by mid summer, but they’ll start seeing snow again in early September. Short summer!

The scenery is simply breathtaking along the way, and if you don’t mind standing on one of the outside platforms of the train you can get some pretty good photos. Since the train is moving and doesn’t have the smoothest ride, you need to be a little careful with shutter speed, and you have to be a little strategic with timing since there is really only one good spot on each end of the car, and the side to be on varies on which side of the mountain the train is on. Since we had done this tour on our first visit and were lucky enough to have the last car on that tour, with unobstructed views from the back of the train, I mostly stayed inside and enjoyed the view from where it was warm, except for a few spots where I knew the views were good. I also spent a good bit of time outside at the summit while they swapped the engine from one end of train to the other. Best to have the engine in front on the downhill run!

Since we didn’t have far to travel from our previous stop in Juneau, and didn’t have far to sail to our next destination in Glacier Bay, we were essentially in Skagway from 7:00AM until 10:00PM. That gave us plenty of time to explore after our train ride, but we only needed a few hours before we felt like we had pretty much seen Skagway. Go figure! We did make time to have a very good lunch and some locally brewed beer at the Skagway Brewing Company. It was a good spot, a little pricey but worth every dollar. There aren’t too many places where you can get an authentic Alaskan Salmon sandwich for lunch!

Random photos from walking around Skagway, Alaska

We had been to Skagway on a previous cruise, but didn’t see any of the town on that trip because we ended up booking two tours, and since we barely had time between the two of them for lunch, we didn’t have any chance to explore. We took a much slower pace on this trip and were glad to get a chance to see the town. The focus on tourism is very apparent, as the storefronts are all very attractive and inviting. A lot of it is very kitschey, like the brothel tours “10 for 10 minutes, we call it The Quickie,” Glacier Ice Cream (really?) and the usual T-shirt outlets, but there were a number of shops with some really nice, locally made merchandise, such as a lot of jewelry, carvings and paintings. You could find diamonds and tanzanite too, but I’d be willing to bet that most of those proceeds would not be staying in Alaska. Many of the business had signs touting their native-ness, proclaiming “Alaskan-owned since 19XX” or “Alaskan Homeowners since 19XX.” So there is a little bit of contentiousness between the natives, the seasonal business people and the permanent transplants. I suppose that is the same everywhere.

One of the interesting features of Skagway that I have only seen in a few other ports, is that the rock cliff by the pier is covered with paintings commemorating ships that have visited. As I understand it, each time a ship makes its first call in Skagway, it is traditional for the crew to paint a spot on the rock wall with the name of the ship, the date and the name of the captain.

We really enjoyed our visit to Skagway and are very glad that we took the time to visit the town.

Uncategorized

June Wallpaper

June 1, 2012 Tom Dills 2 Comments

Eagle on Iceberg, Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve in Alaska from aboard Sea Princess — Large and In Charge

Sorry, but I’m having so much fun going through my Alaska photos that I’m going to stick with that theme for this month’s wallpaper calendar. I got a number of good shots in Glacier Bay, so stay tuned to an upcoming post with more photos. This one sort of best fits my criteria for wallpaper, so hopefully it’s a photo you don’t mind looking at for a month or so while summer here gets geared up!

It’s hard to imagine as I sit here with the temperature outside hovering around 90 that I was standing on the deck of a cruise ship in boots, wool socks, long underwear, a hat and gloves! I tried to bring some of that cold home with me but I think it slipped out of my bag in San Francisco. 🙂

I hope everyone has a splendid June. We’ve got a few birthdays in the family in June, so special wishes to those-who-know-who-they-are!

Tom Dills Photography Blog

Long Overdue

July 2012 Wallpaper

Wine Country!

Victoria, BC

Ketchikan

More About That Boat

Attitude Adjustment

Glacier Bay

Skagway

June Wallpaper

Photographs and stuff!