This past weekend in Ohio was mostly an exercise in exploration for Jim. He was only two when we moved to Kentucky, so he doesn’t have any real memories of living there. It’s just things he’s been told by others. I doubt if any of my brothers remember much about that time. Even Eddie was only five when we left. For me, it’s an odd mixture of things I’ve been told, that sometimes don’t seem to agree with what I think I remember or what I see when I’m there, and actual memories.
Ohio farm country is mostly very flat.
I remember going to church. I was in a play there once. I remember learning lines and being on stage, but not what the play was about. I know it wasn’t a traditional Christmas pageant about the birth of Christ, but I’m simply not clear on any other facts. I knew the church was out in the country. There don’t actually seem to be any churches in Conover, where we lived. However, I didn’t realize until Aunt Jean was reminiscing on Saturday that it was the same church she attends now. We’ve been there several times with her and I had no deja vu at all. …
Since we got back from California, I have been troubled by the number of people who have asked how we made the trip without killing each other. It seems that some of our friends are under the impression that Jim and I don’t get along very well.
Jim and good friend Jose Lopez Jr. waiting for the Trains in Southern California's Cajon Pass.
They hear us bickering and think we must be angry, but we never get angry. We sometimes disagree and when that happens neither of us is willing to give up. It’s in our DNA to always be right. However, we are mature enough to know that our instincts are frequently bad for us and we never get angry with each other about disagreements.
In fact, there are times when we deliberately pick at each other just for amusement. We don’t really indulge this idiosyncrasy with anyone else in the family. The strength of our relationship is the reason we can push right to the edge of anger without crossing the line.
Fascinating rock formations...Oh, look, a train.
I guess people who don’t really know both of us have trouble understanding. I am the oldest of five children. He is the youngest. Growing up, we didn’t really spend time together. When I got married the first time, he was only nine years old. When I moved to California, he was only eleven. We began to develop a real relationship when I returned to Kentucky, but he left for the Air Force not long afterward. We didn’t get to spend enough time together to discover how much we are alike until years later. …
While Jim searched for a unique viewpoint, I just shot the wall.
It’s been nearly two months since I had a normal schedule. I am so far behind on updating websites, it’s embarrassing. I still had thousands of photos to sort through and edit when we left for the Pennyrile Fall Photo weekend which, of course added hundreds more to the total.
My brain feels like that scrambled egg in the anti-drug commercials.
Even the reflection shot wound up being the same one I've done before.
I simply wasn’t feeling creative or inspired enough to come up with good shots. At the end of two days of shooting, I had more than 500 pictures and none of them really pleased me. Participation involved submitting four shots whether I liked them or not, so I did, but I wasn’t surprised when none of them even placed. If I found them boring, I didn’t expect the judge to feel any different.
The good thing is that I now get to stay home and start catching up. For the next two weeks, I do not plan to leave Madisonville at all. In fact, I don’t plan to even leave the house most days. I do love road trips, but 5 weeks of travel is enough even for me.
Morning light and fog on the water still didn't really inspire me.
The trip to Baltimore to pick up my grandson, Brad, and his family from the airport is probably what finally killed my enthusiasm. Going up wasn’t too bad, except for being tired to begin with, and the people at the airport were great., However, coming back it rained, the truck broke down, and things just kept on getting worse. I took very few photos. Later on, I’ll do a post on the trip and add those. At the moment, I think they are on the laptop. I’m just too tired to pull it out and transfer them over. Right now, I need to get back to work on updates to my church website.
A mural showing the "Survivor Tree" after the bombing.
Well posting every day on our California trip didn’t exactly work out as planned. Driving around 400 miles a day with extended stops for photo ops didn’t leave much time for writing or editing pictures. The first hint of a problem came in Oklahoma City when we spent a total of about 4 hours at the National Memorial for the 1995 bombing. I did manage to pull the pictures off the camera and put them into labeled folders on the laptop every night, but that’s about all. The few things we managed to post along the way are not even the tip of the iceberg that our ship crashed against.
The "Survivor Tree" as it looks today.
It’s been a very busy month, with no end in sight. We’ve been home (well sort of) for a week and I haven’t even gotten caught up on all my email, much less updating websites and editing pictures.
To do the trip the way we originally conceived it would have taken, at least, twice as long. We really needed to visit attractions and shoot photos on one day, spend the next day editing pictures, checking email, working on websites, and updating the blog-, then travel to the next destination on the third day. Then we would have needed to add on the week for visiting with friends. So we would have been gone about 2 months. Oh well, the dream’s still there. Maybe when Jim retires again, we’ll be able to make the trip that way. …
The photo walk was not part of our original schedule. However, we’ve done the World-wide Photo Walk for the past three years and didn’t want to miss it if we could help it. We chose one that started a little after 8am and was supposed to be finished by 10am. It was a good group and we enjoyed it, especially since it was outside our normal environment. It was, however, nearly 11:30 by the time we finished.
We didn’t leave L.A. until nearly noon. We resigned ourselves to another schedule adjustment. After all, nothing is set in stone except the hotel reservations. Plan A that put us in Moab, Utah by noon on October 1st was revised. We stopped just north of the city for lunch at a Carl’s Jr., so Jim could have his mythical “favorite burger anywhere,” and worked out Plan B. The original plan included a stop at Zion National Park, but Jim was reluctant to spend the time, since we were running later than expected. According to Plan B we were going to make the Arches by mid-afternoon so he could find a good place to, at least, get some nice sunset shots.
Just inside the entry from I-15.
The Arches National Park is one of the major stops on his agenda and he originally intended to spend 3 full days there. The delay meant that had been cut back to 2 1/2 days. Miraculously, we didn’t hit any real traffic problems on the way out of the L.A. area and calculating the distance and speed limit he finally agreed we could afford an hour at Zion. Just a quick drive in and out at the north entrance to buy a National Parks season pass for seniors, with a couple of stops for quick photos of the high points. Such a foolish idea. We stopped a couple of places on the way in and, telling ourselves we had a schedule to keep, turned around fairly soon to head out. However, every few minutes one of us would say, “Look there, I’ve got to have that shot.” We knew we had lost it when we couldn’t resist the temptation to climb down one of the trails into a small gorge to check out the stream we could hear running along the bottom.
Clear Water Singing Over Stones
As we returned to I-15, we “re-calculated” and decided, if we didn’t stop anywhere else, we could still make Arches by 5 PM. I used the weather App on my phone to check the sunset time in Moab and it said 7:10 PM. As navigator, I pulled out the Arches map and made a guess at possible sites we could reach quickly for sunset views. If you’ve ever driven from Zion toward the Arches, you know how beautiful it is and that the highway department has provided a generous supply of places to pull over safely. The adjustment to Plan B was soon to be blown out of the water.
The first glitch came in the form of gorgeous red cliffs against blue mountains. I eyed them from the distance for a while as we came down out of a pass. Finally, I said to Jim, “That’s really nice.” He said, “Yeah, I’ve been watching it too. Look for a place to pull over. It’ll only take a minute.” Can you say “famous last words?”
The fluffy white clouds made stopping even harder to resist.
We soon found ourselves pulling off the highway again in search of Red Cliffs Park. After spending nearly an hour there, we set our sights on 6pm at Arches and swore we wouldn’t stop again. You know how well that went, right? All those convenient pullover spots together with stupendous cliffs and beautiful wide screen vistas are irresistible, especially when you know you may not have another chance to capture them. We finally gave up as we were flying downhill at 75 miles an hour and Jim said, “Oooo. Ooo. Look! There!” and headed for the breakdown lane. He couldn’t even wait for a pullover area. We both broke out laughing. We were laughing too hard to snap the picture and every time we looked at each other, it started over again.
With Plan B gone for good, we simply gave up. By the time we got to the Arches, it was fully dark. We pulled into the park and drove up to the first impressive set of cliffs. Jim took a couple of night shots, just to have a check-in for Facebook and we went on to Moab to check in to the motel and look for a place to eat. To all our friends who have suggested that spontaneity should be the method of choice for vacations, it isn’t a good idea for us. If we didn’t have deadlines to meet, it would probably take us longer to cross the country than the average wagon train took in the 1800s and they didn’t even have cameras.
