Photo Blogging

Good morning everyone,

Month 2 begins. Looks like this will be a tough one. Grid yourself.

In previous dispatches On The Road, we’ve visited all the missions in Los Angeles to the Mexican border, now we head north(or actually west for a bit). I grew up in Ventura County and have seen the exterior of Mission San Buenaventura many times as we past it on the freeway or surface streets, I’d never been inside. This visit was made on a return from a meetup of the local photography group’s visit to Mission Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Courthouse. Mission San Buenaventura is one of the smallest missions that I’ve visited, it takes up about 3-4 storefronts in downtown Ventura. It was founded in 1782 as the ninth and last mission personally dedicated by Father(now Saint) Serra. It was once much larger but shrunk to the chapel, a small garden and the gift shop.

Ventura, CANovember 23, 2019

Front of the chapel at Mission San Buenaventura.

On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – Mission San BuenaventuraPost + Comments (6)

Good morning everyone,

Sorry for the misfire yesterday, and I think this is out of order. C’est la vie.

Sarajevo was a sharp contrast to the other stops in the trip, since although most of it is a modern city (especially having been rebuilt after shelling during the post-Yugoslavia wars), it had strong Ottoman influence, particularly in the Baščaršija, Sarajevo’s old bazaar and the historical and cultural center of the city that was built in the 15th century.

On The Road – Sister Golden Bear – Sarajevo, Bosnia and HerzegovinaPost + Comments (5)

Good morning everyone,

Be safe, and lift each other up. We’re all under crazy stress.

Leaving Budva for Dubronik, instead of taking the typical route along the coastline, I was interested in doing an inland detour to see Trebinje in the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, since it’s one of the stops in the Rick Steves tour of Croatia.

As mentioned previously, back in 2012, the online maps of Bosnia and Herzegovina were oddly scant, but I did spot what appeared to be a highway leading up to the Montenegrin border, and it was logical to assume that it went on to Trebinje, since it was the only major town nearby. The good news, yes it did. The bad news, the road turned out to be a tollroad — and I’d gotten rid of the last of my marks a few days earlier. And no, they didn’t take Euros. Finally, with traffic backing up behind me, the toll taker finally allowed me through.

It turns out that I needn’t have bothered. Trebinje, a town of 30,000, turned out to be a fairly depressing place, since its economy tanked after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Although in fairness to Rick Steves, his tour visits the local Serbian Orthodox monastery, which would’ve been an interesting exposure to all three of ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia.

On the other hand, Dubrovnik was as fabulous as its reputation, and I was lucky that no cruise ships were visiting that day — Dubrovnik is actually quite small, and having visitors two or three cruise ships at once can make it unpleasantly crowded

The main street in Dubrovnik, is actually a bit slippy from all the stones being worn down by centuries of people walking over them.

Unfortunately, during the Yugoslavia civil war the street was also a lethal place to be, since snipes in the nearby hills had a clean line of sight along the length of the street.

On The Road – Sister Golden Bear – Dubronik, CroatiaPost + Comments (23)

Good morning everyone,

Have a good weekend, we’ll see you Monday.

Actually being On The Road suddenly has become a thing of the past, and hopefully the future. In this plague year, in a country ruled by incompetents, it may be a while before travel is prudent, especially for those of us (like me) who are 60+ years old.

But it is spring in the heartland, and the birds are returning, or leaving, or passing through. Birdwatching and bird photography, especially here in flyover country, are actually excellent social distancing tactics. So I plan to continue to seek our birds and images here in north-central KS, and share them with Alain to use as he sees fit. For most of you, I’m sure, this part of the USA is almost like visiting a foreign country!

We were supposed to go to the AWP conference in San Antonio TX in early March. AWP stands for Association of Writers and Writing Programs (I know, you’d think a bunch of writers would actually generate an accurate acronym…), and a book that Elizabeth co-edited was going to be launched at a big party sponsored by her press (Trinity University Press). San Antonio had a coronavirus case early (a true study in incompetence, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-grand-princess-evacuees-texas/2020/03/09/9bf9e360-6142-11ea-b3fc-7841686c5c57_story.html), the conference was not cancelled outright, but sponsors pulled out, attendees stayed away, and the press cancelled the party because really, who wants to put on a party that nobody will go to. So we were halfway there, somewhere On The Road in Oklahoma, when it became obvious that it was really not a good idea to continue. We turned around. But the book is still ready to go, available on Earth Day 2020, and might appeal to a lot of jackals. Here’s some more information – https://www.terrain.org/2020/news/dear-america-anthology/

All royalties will be donated to organizations who are doing good work in this time of Trumpism (Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the ACLU.

Needless to say, that was tremendously disappointing. But this conference was apparently the first harbinger of the waves of cancellations and life changes that we are now facing. Life goes on, and it is, as I mentioned above, Spring in the Northern Hemisphere!

So here are some images from the last week or so. More to come as spring progresses, and as we navigate through the disaster that the election of 2016 has bequeathed us.

Pottawatomie County KSMarch 13, 2020

Springtime in the Flint Hills of Kansas is a time of destruction, and then renewal. The tallgrass prairies of this region evolved with frequent fires, and depend on frequent fires to maintain a grassland ecosystem. Fire suppression leads to shrubby invasion, and then cedar tree invasion, and then no more prairies. So our ranchers here burn the prairies in the spring, and in a few weeks this darkened landscape will be brilliant green and productive.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Spring in the time of COVID-19Post + Comments (17)

Good morning all,

We return to Sister Golden Bear’s wonderful series of submissions. Enjoy!

From Sarajevo, I wanted to finish the trip with a visit to the Bay of Kotor, but didn’t want to double back through my previous route. Thankfully, in my research I discovered a scenic backroad — very backroad route through the mountains of northeast Montenegro.

I had a tense moment at the border because the car registration paperwork got stuck in the envelope from the rental car company and I couldn’t find it initially. Since smuggling stolen cars into Montenegro was not uncommon, it dealing with border guards who spoke limited English was…. interesting. Thankfully, we eventually found the necessary paperwork and I was free to go.

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

Since this is the prettiest photo, I’m going to jump ahead and start with this one, which is looking down the bay towards Kotor itself. The bay coastal inlet formed by a drowned river valley that remains open to the sea.

On The Road – Sister Golden Bear – Montenegro – Forests and FjordsPost + Comments (17)

Good morning all,

Sorry about Tuesday’s post, the furnace died Monday night and that took my attention.

We go from the highest place in California to the second lowest(the  lowest elevation is Badwater in Death Valley). The Salton Sea is south of Palm Springs and is over 200 feet below sea level. This low elevation is caused by the San Andres fault splintering in to smaller faults and creating a sink. If not for the silt deposited by the Colorado River, this sink would be part of the Gulf of California. Over the millennia a number of lakes have formed in this basin, depending on the climate. The current lake was created when a irrigation canal fed by the Colorado River broke, allowing the entire flow of the river to flow into the Salton sink. The sea is currently fed by the Alamo and New rivers that are highly polluted by agriculture runoff and in the case of the New river, industrial pollution in Mexico. These rivers do not maintain the water level in the sea and it is shrinking. In the mid 20th century a number of towns sprung up along the shores of the lake and were sold as vacation sports, but the pollution and receding shoreline. Bombay Beach is one of these towns on the eastern shore of the sea. Rather than being a vacation destination, ti’s now home to some eclectic art in the town and along the shore of the receding sea.

Bombay Beach, CAFebruary 9, 2020

Warning!

This sign greets you as you walk into the salt flats that were once the Bombay Beach Marina.

On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – Bombay BeachPost + Comments (18)

Good morning all,

We rejoin a submission, already in progress.

Mostar is an easy day trip from Dubrovnik, and tends to overrun with tourists during the day. Since I was driving, I opted to spend the night there on the way to Sarajevo. A major challenge was that (in 2012) for some reason none of the online mapping services had detailed maps of Bosnia and Herzegovina — the maps showed only the major highways. Mostar is not particularly large, and most runs along the river, but it was still a challenge finding my hotel.

Mostar’s main attraction is the Stari Most (Old Bridge) over the Neretva River, which was built in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It stood for 427 years, until it was destroyed in 1993 by Croat paramilitary forces during the Croat–Bosniak War, and then was subsequently rebuilt.

On The Road – Sister Golden Bear – Mostar, Bosnia and HerzegovinaPost + Comments (8)

Good morning everyone,

I’d planned on running some old pics but couldn’t find the submission – my apologies to the submitter.

Fear not, we’ve got a great one to finish out this week.

Take care and stay home! We shall be here Monday to continue Sister Golden Bear’s multipart submission

Silver Falls is the crown jewel of the Oregon State Parks. I’ve been going there since we moved to a home across the the road from the park in 1960 when I was four years old. I’m now retired and live about 20 miles away. The Trail of Ten Falls is my favorite walk fall, winter and spring. I like the open views when the deciduous leaves are down. Nearly all of the initial park development was by CCC crews during the Great Depression. Most of the wooden buildings are gone, stone walls and steps have been rebuilt as needed. The places where they dynamited the trail out of the basalt cliffs haven’t required much maintenance. I usually hike Rim Trail first so that I’m looping back through the canyon past the falls in evening light. There are a ton of great pics of the each of the falls so I’m including little things I see along the trails. Besides the waterfalls we have 6 foot diameter old growth firs, wildflowers in the spring and fall leaves.

Shot with a Panasonic gx85 and 12-32 zoom

Silver Falls State ParkMarch 2, 2020

Lower South Falls from about halfway up the stairs. This is March 2nd and buds are beginning to show.

On The Road – Kelly – Winter at Silver FallsPost + Comments (12)

Good morning everyone,

We have another few submissions from Sister Golden Bear, and we’ll begin today and continue Monday. Great stuff!

Take care and keep sane. This is a long-haul situation and we’re just pulling out of the gas station, looking at the road ahead and thinking we’ll be there before long, that it will be a quick drive. It won’t.

I expect this feature will need to evolve a bit, and am mulling around another daily pick-me-up feature, details when I’ve got some time to prep. I know many folks have planned travel-related submissions, and I encourage them, but perhaps we need to move our focus to local pictures and not make those housebound feel even more cut off from life. Still life, portrait, snapshot, and backyard photographers, assemble!

Continuing the travelogue from a few months ago. I took the ferry from Split to Korčula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea.

Like most costal towns in Croatia, it was heavily fortified (having changed hands numerous times over the centuries), but the outer walls were mostly torn down in recent decades.

On The Road – Sister Golden Bear – Korčula, CroatiaPost + Comments (10)

Good morning everyone,

I know I’m not the only one thankful for this submission today. Good luck to all.

Here was the plan..shot a timelapse of the Milky Way rising and then as it faded into the sunrise and take some shots of the Milky Way and some of the nebula near the galactic core with my other camera. When I arrived at Red Rock, the battery on my NX1 was dead(somehow the power switch got switched on), so I used the NX500 to shoot the timelapse while I used the car to charge the NX1(turns out I had a fully charged battery in my camera bag). The NX500 hadn’t had the SD-card formatted so it ran out of space just as dawn was breaking and I had to delete an earlier folder and then ran into a low battery(it’s got a much smaller battery than the NX1). The timelapse turned out reasonably well and I got one shot of the Milky Way with a bit of the Sun’s light at the horizon. I was planning on checking traffic for the drive back to LA and if bad, I’d head north and shoot some pictures of Mt. Whitney. Red Rock is a bit remote and there’s not a cell signal there, so I headed north anyway. I stopped at the Red Hill in Coso and then on to Lone Pine. The view of the Mt. Whitney(the tallest peak in the loser 48 states) was stunning in the morning light. I was thinking of shooting Mt. Whitney though the Mobius Arch, but I wasn’t sure how far I’d need to travel over the dirt road that was already loosening some of my fillings. So I drove back and stuck to the paved road and stopped just short of where the road makes it’s climb up into the Sierra and west to Whitney Portal.

Coso, CaliforniaFebruary 27, 2020

About mid way between Red Rock and Lone Pine, the Red Hill crater looms in front of you as you travel north on US395. It’s a volcanic cone that last saw an eruption about 10,000 years ago.

On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – Mt. WhitneyPost + Comments (20)

Good morning everyone,

Let’s enjoy some walks – we all can relate these days, I’m sure.

Don’t forget, we’d all love to see YOUR walks, so please submit. This feature only works with your help.

On the daily walks….

The Road in Bloom

On The Road – SkyBluePink – Literally- On The RoadPost + Comments (19)

Greetings and salutations everyone,

Ensure your preparations are in full swing; ordering from Amazon or in-store pickup from your grocer, Target, WalMart, etc. can be a good way to get what you need while avoiding the crowds and fighting for the last box of spaghetti.  It’s going to get a whole heck of a lot worse before it gets better, but stores being supplied with goods should be only an intermittent problem, and this is day 2 of that being an issue. By midweek, most stores will be restocked if only partially. In a few weeks things will be different so complete your preparations during times of good supply – once sufficient truckers and stevedores and warehouse workers get sick, things will slow down a bit until logistics adapt so shortages will come.

There is no need to panic, but a week from now, things will be self-evidently going to hell as many health care facilities will become overwhelmed. Plan and be patient.

We can get through this together, but safely apart. The time to spend as little time around others as possible is here – hurrah! for some folks, no doubt. But seriously, we need to be anti-social hermits for the next weeks to months. It looks like we could be talking into the deep summer before that changes if things go semi-bad. Crazy.

Take care and do follow the now-all-important advice: Don’t act like you’re worried about getting infected, act like you’re infected and don’t infect anyone else. Anything that comes in your house should be set aside into a safe closet or room with a door (or a secondary vehicle’s trunk) so that no person or pet comes into contact with it for 72 hours. Alternatively you can sanitize it, but that takes 10 minutes of being “wet” for most surfaces and cleaners so that can burn through a lot of cleaner quickly.

They won’t tell you that one reason that this didn’t spread as easily in South Korea and Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore is that the general population wear masks when they feel sick when out in public and this is such a fundamental of good public health. Even healthy folks will wear them if something’s going around, and it does seem to work. There are many other reasons about the limited spread, but there are many who are convinced that this wholesale embrace of masks reduces community spread.

As for being sick and spreading it when in public, I remember my junior year high school mid-terms, one kid was very sick in the year below me and got 1/2 of his class sick on Monday; by Wednesday, they were home and the entire set of exams had to be redone for that grade. It was a grave lesson to me, as was the history I studied which talked of plagues and flues spreading unchecked until isolation and herd resistance provided a solution.

Take care of yourselves, we’re so blessed with this community and its resources for so many things we’ll need over the next few weeks and months.

As I said Friday, find some new hobbies or projects because life is going to be VERY different for the next month and a half (miracle scenario) to 4 months (realistic good) to 8 months (realistic slightly bad) to over a year (realistic very bad). Some changes, such as not shaking hands, will likely be permanent, as in, we will not do that physical contact with strangers thing and movies and TV shows showing that interaction will seem foreign and weirdly naive in the future.

To that I say: “Be well, fellow citizen and try to have some joy-joy feelings in your day!”

My wife and I went to Chile around Thanksgiving-time last year. We spent time in three areas of the country and went from Santiago (a city of 8 million people) in the center to Tierra del Feugo at the southern tip of the Continent of South America.

I have way too many pictures from our trip to share more than a tiny bit at a time as I took almost 4K photos of birds, scenery, flowers/trees and of course more spectacular scenery.

We saw Santiago and the nearby Andes Mountains, which remind me of Southern California, The Lake Region which reminded me alternately of the Pacific Northwest or home here in Pennsylvania with all the dairy cows and Patagonia which is so much like the western US in many ways but with  strange animals!

The one place we went to with didn’t really feel like anywhere else I’ve ever been was a private park on Isla Grande de Chiloé (Chile’s largest island). Chiloé is in the Region of Los Lagos and has many spots that remind one of New England but the climate is mild-temperate and the native forests are moss-filled rainforests with a mix of broad-leaf and coniferous trees.

We spent 3 days in the wild area of Parque Tepuhueico a large private wilderness on the western side of the island. To get there we drove to the edge of the park and then because the one lane road bridge had washed out a few years ago we had to walk across a swinging pedestrian bridge and then ride in their 4-wheel drive van more than a mile to the lodge. Some of us got out and walked the last quarter mile as it was sunny and the fantastic plants and flowers beckoned. It was the only real sunny period we had there, but the place was still amazing when even when is was cool and drizzling.

We stayed in the one lodge building and our group of 8 took up most of their rooms. It is a very interesting looking building, to say the least. There were interesting birds and I did get one brief 15-minute period to see the full southern night sky without light pollution (before the clouds came back in) but the most amazing thing to me were the plants and also seeing pudú, the world’s smallest deer!

Chile is a wonderful country and while we worried a little beforehand about the protests and rioting, that had little impact on us because our guides used routes that avoided the scheduled protests and changed a few of our locations to protests that disrupted traffic. I hope they succeed in ”de-Milton Friedmanizing” the country and providing good free education, affordable medicine and real retirement security to the people in this economically strong, but very skewed country.

Tepuhueico Park, Chiloé Island, Los Lagos Region, ChileNovember 24, 2019

Our group walking out to look for birds in the temperate rainforest.

On The Road – Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!) – Tepuhueico Park, Chiloé Island, Los Lagos Region, ChilePost + Comments (16)

Good morning everyone,

Today we return to a wonderful place and time, the before-time before the New Now. But first, a few important words.

Have a great weekend – look, smile, rejoice, and prepare: the next 8-9 days will really challenge us domestically and the next few weeks will be horrible in many ways.

There are lurking hordes of infected across the country, everywhere. Not literally, but there are many infected all around, and so in a few days, they will beget hordes of infected that will show quite apparently in hospitals everywhere. Health care system stress will begin to overwhelm in many areas within a day or two of the surge beginning.

Stay in if you can and limit you and your family’s exposure to others, especially in groups, for the next 2-6 weeks. No joke. It’s that serious and for that long, at least. Prepare without panicking because that won’t do you any good. But do prepare, that will do you a lot of good.

Stay away from other people – 12 to 15 feet – and ensure you wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water multiple times a day, even more so if you encounter lots of other people closely. Wave but do not fist-bump or elbow-bump as those both get you too close. Stay 12 or more feet away from others.

No groups, no teams, no choirs, no reunions, no conferences, no meetings, no outings, no tours, no theater, no movies, no opera, no symphony, no museum, etc.

No cruises, flights, bus trips, train trips. Be careful in taxis, Lyfts, and Ubers. Do not touch surfaces you haven’t cleaned and sanitized.

Avoid any gathering of 100 people or more. Really, avoid any groups if you can – if we all stayed away from each other for 10 days, it would be over, but we’re people and not robots, so do what you can because some jackholes will be irresponsible.

Do not touch any strange or unclean surface and then your face. In fact, do not touch your face at all. This takes practice. Take advantage of the time you have now to retrain yourself, in a couple of weeks it will help you not make the simple mistake that will then infect you. Wearing bulky gloves around the house or office can force you to re-map your hand-to-face interactions.

Alcohol-based hand sanitizer of at least 60% alcohol concentration can be used to sanitize hands by rubbing it into the hands until it evaporates or is absorbed, but that is a “until I can get to a sink to use soap and water” stopgap.

Soap and warm-to-hot water for a vigorous, thorough hand-finger-thumb-back-of-the-hand-under-fingernail scrub for at least 20 seconds then rinse is best for cleaning your hands of viruses and bacteria. Soap literally destroys the lipid-based virus cell walls like a drop of Dawn dispels grease in a soaking pan in the sink.

For the next 2-6 weeks, we’ll be living a different reality than we have in memory, so the sooner you embrace that idea, the better it will go for you. More and more things will shut down as the days progress – schools, travel, business, worship,and the like. Large facilities are going to be repurposed into health care and recovery facilities, and lots of folks will be repurposed to health care and support. Dorms may end up being used for housing of patients; this is a National Emergency.

Barriers will slow down store resupply (already we see toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, bleach, paper towels, etc. shortages) so prepare. This is coming, folks. Fast.

Work at home, etc., don’t spread any sickness, wear gloves to touch foreign surfaces or to train you to not touch your face, resolve yourself to not getting around many folks in public for the next 2-6 weeks. Treat this as a contagion because it is – if you make a mistake and are contaminated, stop the spread by sequestering yourself for the 14 days necessary to show non-infection. Even better, be the guardian for those around you and do a good job: one slip-up can infect you and then you can infect others for days before showing any symptoms.

Sanitize surfaces, wash hands like a nutcase-cum-trauma-surgeon, and figure out alternatives to your sports, hobby, academic, fraternal, professional, etc. activities and organizations. This won’t be a couple of weeks, even months. Don’t go nuts, find some new things that you can do at home or online.

We’ve got a new normal and we don’t quite see it yet – it is two weeks from now, not two weeks ago. It will come into clear focus come month’s end.

Our trip to St Augustine and Little St. Simon’s Island ended with the passage of a major cold front that led to high winds and heavy rains all along the east coast of the country. We were on a barrier island a bit away from the action, but the thunder, wind and rain did make for an interesting last night there. No major damage was noticed; barrier islands are well-suited for heavy weather. But it’s likely that some of the regular inhabitants (alligators, armadillos, birds etc.) were hunkered down!

Little St. Simon's Island GAFebruary 6, 2020

Roseate Spoonbill, flying past Myrtle Pond, just for Betty. A few of these colorful waders spend the winter this far up the coast, but this is the only one we saw. Fortunately it was heading into a strong wind and thus flew slowly past our location.

On The Road – Albatrossity – Florida and Georgia continuedPost + Comments (20)

Good morning all,

We do live in interesting times, don’t we?

Been planning something like this for a while, this is just some I’ve already collected. Most from film prints scanned on a *meh* scanner. Hope they transfer ok.

Grand Lake Stream, Maine

Big Lake (the name as well as the description) from Shoreline Camps.

On The Road – p.a. – Not a place; waterPost + Comments (15)

Good morning everyone,

As always, it’s a good Wednesday when we have something special from Bill to share.  Please do look at his site and become a patron.

On a political note, I’ve seen a rumor that Bernie will be suspending today or tomorrow, but we shall see. That would be a momentous development, to put it mildly.

Joe wasn’t my first or second choice, but he’s a decent man and we can use some of that. I know we’re all on team Broken Glass.

It’s the down-ballot race, really state legislatures I’m most concerned with, TBH, and it’s all because of  redistricting based on the 2020 Census data (new legislative boundaries are drawn after initial Census estimates are produced). This literally writes the map for a state for a decade (nasty Republican shenanigans to do additional redistrictings aside, of course) and so getting any and all potential D voters out to vote for all these seemingly less-important candidates is of utmost importance, even if we lose the White House or don’t retake the Senate.  So when talking to prospective voters, please do encourage them to support their state D candidates because it’s so very important that we have fair political boundaries to enscourage responsive, representative politicians.

I drove up to Vasquez Rocks north of the San Fernando Valley in the small town of Agua Dulce. While I’ve driven past them(you can see them from The 14), I’ve never stopped. They’re rocks that have been upthrust to the surface and are quite a sight even from the distant freeway. They’re now a county park that unfortunately closes at sunset(the parking lot closes at 5pm so you even miss the sunset). The rocks were a hideout for Tiburcio Vasquez in the late 1800’s and his name has been associated with the rocks since then. The rocks may look familiar since they’ve been in a number of movies and TV. Probably their most famous appearance is in the first season of Star Trek in 1967 in an episode called Arena, where Capitan Kirk is transported to a planet and battles a lizard creature called the Gorn.  The largest rock is unofficially known as ‘Kirk’s Rock’.

Since the skies up there(as opposed to the basin) were clear and blue, I’ve taken some liberties with the sky in some of the photos and replaced it with something more interesting with Luminar 4’s sky replacement feature.

Vasquez Rocks, Agua Dulce, CA

Wide view of ‘Kirk’s Rock’ from the north after leaving the parking lot.

On The Road – 🐾BillinGlendaleCA – ArenaPost + Comments (19)