From Peter Turnley on Instagram:
Edouard Boubat to Peter Turnley: “Peter, let me tell you a secret-if you always keep your head up, and your eyes and heart open-there is a gift waiting for you at the corner of every street”.
Thought For The Day
All Used Up
I spotted this old relic during our walk a few days ago. It might make for an interesting photo study, except for the fact that it sits at the very end of the 1.5-mile trail!
I keep thinking that this would make a decent black & white image, but I haven’t come up with a version I’m happy with. When I take the color out the tones are all the same and the image looks like a flat, jumbled mess. I’ll keep working with it to see what I can do, but in the meantime I like the color version just fine!
Mount Holly Trail at Mountain Island Park
Kathy & I were recently looking for someplace different to walk besides the sidewalk between our neighborhood and the main drag, and decided to explore the Mount Holly Trail at nearby Mountain Island Park. Walmart and Micky D’s are only so scenic!
The park is located next to the Mountain Island Hydroelectric plant at the south end of Mountain Island Lake, just outside the town of Mount Holly and only about 8 miles from our neighborhood. The park contains a large parking lot with fishing area, small playground and hiking/biking trails. We walked the 1.6-mile trail to the end and back, which made for a nice afternoon.
The trail is mostly an easy walk for anyone in reasonably good walking shape. There are a few hills, mostly on the far end from the parking area. A portion of the trail surface close to the parking area is pretty coarse gravel, which makes for rough walking for a bit. This area of the trail is close to the river, and I would guess it floods occasionally, thus the need for heavier base. We were there on a dry day without a lot of heavy preceding rain, and there were a few muddy places along the trail. Overall the trail is in very good shape, but I would suggest sturdy shoes. The woods should be very pretty as the trees and vegetation green up in the spring.
We were there on a Wednesday in January, so there was not much traffic, mostly couples and people with dogs. We saw a few mountain bikers on main trail as well as the adjacent mountain bike trails as it got later in the day, but not too bad.
We’re hoping to explore some more walking & hiking areas over the coming months, and I will report on them here for anyone who is interested. Or anyone who just wants to see the photos!
Tom’s Trail Summary:
Length: 1.6 miles to the end, or 3.2 miles round trip. There are several options for shorter loops, or out-back for a shorter distance is possible.
Terrain: Mostly flat with occasional hills
Surface: Mostly dirt with a few gravel places. Recommend sturdy shoes like hiking boots.
Comments: The trail is shared with mountain bikers and dog walkers. No motorized vehicles. Pleasant walking along the Catawba River. Should be pretty in the spring as trees and plants green up. I tried to find a link to a trail map but could only find a Google Map to the parking area!
Reflecting On Reflections
I recently posted a few reflection photos to Instagram, and it got me thinking about how much time I spend looking for reflections. My conclusion? Not nearly enough!
Photos of boats in a marina with still water are pretty low-hanging fruit. I need to remind myself that while I am looking for lines, pattern and shadows, to keep my eyes peeled for good candidates for reflections.
Minds Over Mayhem
Like many people, I am astonished and embarrassed by the behavior of my fellow humans, especially over the last 24 hours but indeed over the last what? 24-48-60+ months? The extent to which people can be deceived, incited and provoked to extremes is frightening.
It’s very popular right now to talk of impeachment, imprisonment and removal from office those who have corrupted and vandalized our democracy. Whether it happens or not remains to be seen, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that approach. In fact, in many ways I welcome it as a lesson to those responsible and as a deterrence against continuing such behavior. What I ultimately hope, however, is that once all the angry words settle down and people go back to their lives, cooler heads can take a look at the problems in our country today and try to come up with meaningful solutions.
The question I keep coming back to is this: How desperate are the people who are attracted to false hope, lies, deceit and corruption that they so fervently believe in it to the extent that they can be moved to such atrocious actions? This is more than racial, religious, ideological or political difference. This more than an undercurrent. It is a raging river.
Whether by chance or by choice we as a society tend to be attracted to turmoil like moths to a flame. Thankfully, I spend most of my time doing things that I find calming and rewarding, and don’t get myself too riled up over all of the negativity that has swirled around us for far too long. I don’t ignore the media, in my opinion that would be irresponsible. But I have managed to insulate myself and – for the most part my opinions and attitudes – from most of the mayhem so that I’m not living with the anger and angst that many people feel and that I might otherwise be dealing with. Not everyone is able to do that and I feel fortunate that I can.
I don’t have the answers. I can only hope that the changes coming over the next few weeks, the next few months and the next few years, can head us in a more positive direction. One where we can disagree peacefully, work together for the common good to find equitable solutions to problems and to live in peace within our own country and in our world. Let’s hope for that, and where we personally are able, live that.
Another Sunrise…With A Bonus!
I had to wait until this morning to have my first sunrise opportunity of the year. The weather the last few days has basically been crap, but the forecast for this morning held promise. Rather than set an alarm I told myself that if I woke up in time I would head out to see what I might find. Usually when I try that approach I either wake up too early or too late, but this morning I woke up at 5:50 which was just about perfect.
I arrived at the boat launch area right at 6:30 and was treated to some amber city-lit clouds low to the horizon and a clear sky with clouds above. Pretty sweet! No fog this time, but that was good for better reflections. I got a few shots of that then aimed my camera at the causeway to catch some light trails. There is a lot more traffic on a Monday morning than there was on the Sunday morning when I last visited!
The parking lot was completely deserted when I arrived, but the first boater showed about about 6:45. He was well organized and put in quickly, but it was too dark to get anything usable. The second boater arrived about 7:15, took his time futzing around with this gear and finally left the dock just as the sun was coming up. That made for some good light on the boat as it putted through the No Wake zone.
The bonus though was that, all of a sudden, I heard birds, lots of them. Then overhead came a huge cloud of some kind of small black birds, probably starlings, grackles or similar black birds – hundreds of them! And that cloud was followed by another, then another. I have no idea how many of them there were, but there were a bunch. Fortunately I had my camera set up for a wide angle shot of the water and sky, so I was able to catch a few frames with the birds, even though they were a bit blurry. They were moving fast!
So in addition to a pretty sunrise I got an impromptu air show! All in all it was a worthwhile visit and I got a few shots to start off the new year. The weather looks like might deteriorate again the next few days but I’ll keep a lookout for another opportunity!
After The Demolition Derby That Was 2020, We’re “Still Running!”
When I was growing up, my family would regularly attend stock car races at a couple of local race tracks. A few times a year the tracks would have events called Demolition Derbies, where a bunch of stripped-down cars would start out running around the track and purposely wreck each other, with the last car running declared the winner. I’m recalling this through 50+ years of possibly (likely!) faulty memory, but as I recall, somewhere near the end when there were only 2 or 3 cars running, the announcer providing the blow-by-blow commentary would say something like “CAR 83 IS SMOKING BADLY, HAS A COUPLE OF FLAT TIRES BUT IT’S STIIIIIILLLLL RUNNING.” I have to say that after the demolition derby that was 2020, we’re badly damaged but STILL RUNNING. And hopefully running well enough to hang on through 2021.
Somewhat counter to the rest of society (contrarians? us?) and despite the various impacts of the virus, Kathy & I look back on 2020 as overall a very good year. We made some important changes that we possibly would/should have made anyway, but the arrival of Covid made them imperative. It worked out, and WE”RE STILL RUNNING! Believe me though, I am quite sensitive to the fact that not everyone can say the same about 2020. For way too many folks, 2020 was a very ugly year. A disastrous year. A demolition derby with not everyone escaping unscathed. From where I sit, however, life has been pretty darned good and I am thankful for that.
But we traveled. We traveled a bit differently than in past years, with a little more attention paid to places and conditions, avoiding the famous places with big crowds, carrying more of our food and water than we might have taken otherwise, but the country was open and we went. In fact, we traveled more in 2020 than we ever have. We spent 90+ days away from home, crossed off 5 new states and visited friends and family in locations far & wide. Despite only driving 426 miles in March, April & May, we’ve put over 18,000 miles on the Subie since 12/31/19, mostly in the second half of the year and including our 8,000-mile road trip to the Oregon coast and back in September. And we did it safely, staying away from popular places like National Parks and sticking mostly to sparsely-visited National Monuments, National Historic Parks, State Parks and Wildlife Refuges. A number of places were not open so we made do by seeing just the outside. Yes, we traveled!
With exceptional (in hindsight) timing we took three cruises in January-February before the virus hit but have stuck to car travel since then. Staying off airplanes and cruise ships has saved us a bunch of money and allowed us to see parts of the country we might have put off if we had continued to fly places. It looks like that trend will continue in 2021, since the question of when we might expect to receive a vaccine remains a bit of a mystery. That assumes that the vaccines are actually effective, that we can eventually actually get one and that the virus begins to subside. Cruises and air travel will likely need to wait until 2022 for us, but there is still a lot of this country to see and we’re ready to go.
Staying out of restaurants has been very good for our waistlines and for our budget. Kathy & I have never been and will never be skinny, but there is a lot less of each of us to haul around these days. We’ve been making regular donations of too-large clothes to our local Goodwill. Even now when restaurants have mostly re-opened, we’re finding that we like our own cooking just fine and we continue to lose weight at a reasonable and sustainable pace without “dieting.” Interestingly, our reaction to a lot of restaurant food now is that it is over-seasoned, over-portioned, overly meat-centric and over-priced. We’ve got a great source for fresh fish, a nice selection of our own wine, and find that we can dine in for a fraction of the cost of a fancy meal out. We love our restaurant people and have many friends in the business, but it is an estranged relationship these days. We weaned ourselves off of junk food years ago and didn’t succumb to the temptation of “comfort food” during the pandemic.
I took nearly 17,000 photos this year. Not as many as 2019 when I took over 21,000, but still a lot! Why so many? I take a lot of our grandson Edison, and he moves so fast most of them are blurry! The number of photos that are actually worth keeping will be far less but remains to be seen as I’m still working on them. I did get a new camera this year, which was fun, and I have enjoyed working with it and the constantly updated software to process the files.
We have a lot to be thankful for from 2020 despite all of the negative happenings, and we have plenty of reason to look forward to 2021. I don’t know how it will all shake out, but the best we can hope for is to get to 12/31/21 in at least as good a shape as we got to the finish line of 12/31/20. My primary goal is to keep a positive outlook, to find the silver lining in every situation and seek out the positive wherever I need to go to find it!
The photos here are just a selection from the friends and family we were able to visit with this past year and who we look forward to seeing again this coming year!
It’s A Wrap – Our Pacific Northwest Road Trip
I’ve finally finished processing all of my picks from our Pacific Northwest road trip!
The last two stops were Fort Scott National Historic Site in Fort Scott, Kansas and George Washington Carver National Monument near Diamond, Missouri.
The two things we most wanted to do in Fort Scott were (1) visit the fort and (2) visit the Gordon Parks Museum. The trip from Fort Larned took longer than we expected, so we arrived at the fort just as they were shutting down for the day. Fortunately, a kind ranger was able to arrange for Kathy to get her Passport book stamped, and we were only able to see the outsides of the buildings.
The Gordon Parks Museum is part of Fort Scott Community College, and the college was closed at the time we passed through. So that will need to be reserved for a future trip. The town of Fort Scott was very quaint with a number of interesting looking shops and restaurants, so it’s likely that we’ll make a point of getting back there at some point.
After spending the night in Joplin, MO we stopped at George Washington Carver National Monument the next day enroute to our last overnight in Clarksville, TN. We had always thought of Carver as the “peanut guy” but he did far more than that. It was another unexpectedly educational visit. After our night in Clarksville we “took the last train” and drove home through Tennessee while (unsuccessfully) dodging heavy thunderstorms!
All in all we drove a total of 8,230 miles over 25 days, and I took nearly 4,500 photos. My picks brought the total down to 1,745 and there are just over 800 photos in the 10 online galleries.
I now have a complete collection of photos from our road trip in my Adobe Portfolio page here.
A Morning Well Spent
I woke up this morning about 5:45. A little early for me but not unusual. As I lay in bed listening to the furnace cranking out some welcome BTUs, I started hearing this voice. A voice that sounded hauntingly similar to the voice in a podcast I listen to. This voice was saying, “ya know, this might just be one of those mornings where you’ll be glad you went out to make photographs.”
I reluctantly crawled out from under the covers, wandered down the hall to my computer, where the Weather Service told me that it was 25 degrees. Ugh. I almost got back into bed. Reasoning that 25 degrees wasn’t any colder than Fort Collins, and remembering that the UP of Michigan is even colder, I resisted and got up.
Although I got rid of my down parka and Sorel boots when we left Ohio 26 years ago, I thankfully held on to some long underwear and wool socks, and I knew where to find them! So I got out my stuff, gathered my gear and headed out.
I arrived at my newly-found sunrise spot at right about 6:30, an hour before sunrise and my preferred time to start taking morning photos. The best color in the morning often happens long before anyone else has their camera ready, just like in the evenings the best color happens while most everyone has packed up and is heading off to dinner.
It was pretty dark when I got there, and the parking lot was empty except for one car. The sky was clear with plenty of stars, or as many as we can usually see here in the suburbs of Charlotte. As the light level came up I could see that there was some fog on the lake, and it was moving around in a very slight breeze.
The first boater arrived about 7:00 – an even heartier soul than me. He offloaded his boat, nursed a sputtering outboard to life and headed off in search of some radioactive catfish. A second boater came a few minutes later and much better luck with his engine. He’s the one I was able to catch leading a wake out through the fog.
By the time the sun came up I had taken 144 frames and it was time to head home for coffee and a shower. As I was putting my camera back in the car I realized I had frost on my tripod. That’s about as cold as I’d like it to be, at least with my current gear!
Not bad for a winter Sunday morning. Weather permitting I hope to be getting back out there again, real soon!
Christmas Lights
Kathy & I gave up covering our house with lights years ago, but still enjoy driving around nearby neighborhoods to check out other peoples’ efforts. Some people really get carried away!
Most neighborhoods we go through have few places to park or walk safely, but this particular spot in Huntersville has two houses next to each other, spectacularly decorated and with reasonable parking, at least when we visited. We were able to get out and walk on the sidewalks without worrying too much about distracted light peepers.
The forecast is calling for some interesting weather here for tonight and Christmas Day, but I don’t think we’ll see any snow. It sounds like a good day to stay snuggled up with coffee and a warm fire. Later in the day we’ll open the bourbon and wine!
We hope everyone has a good holiday this year despite all the mayhem. We are looking forward to lots of positive direction in 2021.
