Category Archives: Travel

West is East of East

Posted by dkrashb on

On our wedding day, we each went through our pre-wedding grooming with anticipation that was surprising considering we’d been living together for 10 years by the time we got married.

Me in my new dress (which Pat helped pick out) and Pat in his new suit (which he’d failed to get tailored, so it gave him a sweet little-boy-in-Dad’s-suit look), we headed towards Mesa.

As a side note, I did not help him pick out his suit.  He thought it was hilarious to not let me see it until the last possible second.  I think he was going for a backwards-themed wedding given that we’d already reversed so many other traditions.

We gave ourselves three times as much time as we’d been told we would need to get to the courthouse.  We had to arrive by 4:50PM so there would still be witnesses there to sign the wedding license.  The judge performed ceremonies after hours.

We made great time, got to the road the courthouse was on with plenty of time to spare, and headed East.  We crossed from W University Dr to E University Dr and started watching for the courthouse.  We got to the spot where it was supposed to be; there was no building with that address.

Puzzled, we turned around and drove back the other way, thinking maybe we had the address wrong and it was really W University Dr.  We got to where the address should should have been and, again, there was no building with that number.

We called the courthouse and they told us they were, in fact, on E University Dr and provided helpful hints for someone who’s never been there like “we’re right next to the intersection where the McDonald’s used to be.”

We turned around, headed back East, and came to the same place we’d been before.  No building had magically appeared.  I called again.  They seemed completely clueless as to where we could be or how to help.  We were starting to panic.  We were running out of time.

On a whim, we decided to keep going East in case there was some weird mis-ordering of addresses or something.  As we continued to go East, E University Dr suddenly became W University Dr again.  This made our heads spin.  I pulled out my glasses to make sure I was looking at the right road on Google maps on my Blackjack (remember those?) fearful we had just gone in a circle without realizing it.  We had not.

We nearly turned around again, but I had the sudden thought that if there were two W University Drives, there must be two E University Drives, too.  So, we kept going East.  And, lo and behold, there was another E University Dr and we found our courthouse just in time.

And that is the story of how I learned West is East of East.

P.S.  Photo Credits on pictures of us go to the Judge who married us–he took pictures with my PowerShot G3 while he was marrying us.

Cliff Driving

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I should start this story by saying I’m terrified of heights.  That said, after our mini-adventure at the Grand Canyon, we decided to take the scenic route back to Scottsdale via the Apache Trail.  This is a scenic drive, not a hike.  I use the term “drive” loosely.  Crawl might be more appropriate.

Somehow, in my meticulous planning of our trip and research on the Apache Trail, I failed to understand that a good portion is a 1 1/2 lane wide, two-way dirt road hung on the side of a cliff so steep and high that I couldn’t manage to look down it.  RVs apparently travel this road from time to time.  I’m convinced had I managed to gather the courage to look over the edge, I would have discovered where those RVs end up.

Since I had rented the car with my frequent traveler points and we hadn’t added Pat as a driver (they charge a lot for that), I had the great pleasure of driving in the outside lane with the cliff on the right.  This was OK since I could mostly drive on the left side of the road, leaving a 1/2 car-width gap between us and the edge of the cliff.  However, panic ensued when a car came the other direction.

This required finding a wide spot in the road, pulling as close to the guard-railless edge and stopping while I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my skin melded with the vinyl covering on the steering wheel.  I can’t claim I was the most pleasant person on this drive.

When the second car approached, it didn’t slow down.  It just came barreling at us like we were on some four-lane highway in the desert.  I got as close to the edge as I dared, stopped, and braced for impact.  The car slipped by so close that had our rearview mirrors been at the same height, they would have hit.  I suspect this was a local who takes great pleasure in terrorizing tourists.

At this point, I didn’t care what the rental car policy said.  I got out of the car and informed Pat I was not driving one more inch.

Unfortunately, sitting in the passenger seat next to the cliff where I couldn’t see the edge of the road was not exactly comforting.  It says a lot about my husband that he didn’t drop me off at the Phoenix airport instead of continuing straight to our hotel by the time we got off that road that was never meant to be a road.

The net of this “scenic” drive was that we didn’t get to enjoy the scenery except when we stopped to stretch at the periodic pullouts.  It also took about the same time to drive the dirt stretch as if we were riding mountain bikes.

My advice: follow the lead of the Apache and walk the darn thing!

Like life, it’s beautiful, but best enjoyed as a destination rather than a route.

Honeymooning

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Ah, dear readers, you are in trouble now:  I have been digging through my old photos again!  Guess what I dug up?  Yes, it’s my wedding.  Well, more accurately, my honeymoon followed by my marriage.  We don’t often do things traditionally.

We decided to elope.  We, coincidentally, had purchased a special deal on 3 nights in a resort in Scottsdale, Arizona earlier that year and had yet to set a date to use it.  This, combined with the fact that, in Arizona, you can get a marriage license the same day you get married set our destination for us.  The dates available for the resort picked our dates.

I imagined a grand adventure to the Grand Canyon–getting married on an overlook before hiking off into the sunset with our backpacks. Then, a luxurious honeymoon in Scottsdale.

Although I had flown over the Grand Canyon many times, I’d never been to it.  It didn’t occur to me that the rim of the canyon is at high altitude.  As I started planning the trip, I soon learned that not much is open at the Grand Canyon in December.

That’s why we ended up doing the honeymoon part of the trip first.

In the end, we drove from the Phoenix airport to Williams, passing through the mountains over icy roads in a snowstorm that seemed to have appeared from nowhere compared to the weather we’d left behind.

We spent the night on Route 66 in a “Honeymoon Suite” Caboose.  It sounded romantic when I booked it.  If you’re looking for a recommendation, I’d say it would be a great place to stay when the outdoor temperature is perfect for sleeping.  Turns out an old caboose has zero insulation and . . . you guessed it . . . it’s made of metal.  You can imagine how thermally efficient that was on a night when it was way below freezing.  Let’s just say it became clear to me why they called it the honeymoon suite (refer to hypothermia survival tactics if you’re confused).

In the morning, we took the train up to the Grand Canyon.  However, we had to make a quick stop at a local general store first.  This is how the discussion went:

Pat:  “You can’t wear your hiking sandals and socks in the snow!”

Me:  “It’s all I brought when we decided we weren’t going to backpack.  I’ll be fine.”

Pat:  “Let’s just get you a pair of snow boots before we get on the train.”

Me:  “Snow boots!  The train leaves at 7AM!  Where are we going to find a pair of snow boots in the off-season in a tourist town at 6:30 in the morning???”

Pat:  “I’m sure there will be a place open.”

Me:  “Why would anyone be open at 6:30 in the morning???”

(This was a pre-coffee conversation.)

Believe it or not, there’s a general store in the middle of Williams that’s open at 6:30AM who sells snow boots in December.  Go figure.

Leave No Trace

Posted by dkrashb on

The realization that from at least the time we’re in the 3rd grade we have an instinctive need to be noticed and recognized and that need only seems to grow as we become adults has me thinking.

Is that what everything we do is really all about?  From whining about loud music at 6:15AM to flying solo in a hang glider off a mountain launch to taking pictures and posting them on the web.  Is it really all about the same thing?

How do we make a mark.  How do we matter.  How does the life we live add up to something that was worthwhile.

Far away, in a beautiful place called Montana, a young woman I think of as a “surrogate” daughter (as in, she’s someone else’s child, but I would like to claim her and her twin sister for my own) is in the middle of creating a new life–literally.  Just over half way through her first pregnancy, she is glowing so much it’s evident even in mobile phone photos and posts on FB.

Watching her grow with this new life inside her via the internet gives whole new meaning to virtual reality.  I am reminded of our visit there about this time of year a couple of years ago.  I pull out the old photos and pick out a few with fall colors that fit my mood.

Having retouched the photos a bit to make them look a little more like I remember the place, I find myself wondering if this will be my contribution to the world.  Pictures that make people smile politely and say, “that’s nice.”  Is this the best I can do when it comes to making my own mark?

I have dreamt of riding my bike (alternately motorized and not, depending on which year I was dreaming in) across the US, of through-hiking the whole of the Appalachian Trail, of writing daring and evocative fiction, of starting a community garden and teaching inner city children how to grow their own food.  I have dreamt of things I have no skills to do and of solving problems I know virtually nothing about.  But when it comes to leaving my mark, instead of raising my hand, I seem to lift my feet.  I want to move, to see, to do.  And the only evidence I leave behind is my footprints.

Do the mountains and trees know I’ve been there appreciating them?  Does the sun set with a little extra punch?

In the end, we are all nomads–we’re all just visiting.  Maybe it’s ok if, like good houseguests, once the laundry has been washed, it’s as if we were never there.

Visual Effects

Posted by dkrashb on

At times like these, I wish I had the kind of job that could be blogged about.  I say this only because I have been spending way too many hours working the past few weeks and, as a result, am running out of more universally interesting things to write about.

Normally, I would have done enough shooting over the weekend to have brand new photos for you and stories to tell about them for the next five days.  Unfortunately, between my photography-free road trip on Saturday and working all day Sunday, I am out of new photos.

Even more frighteningly, I am nearly out of old photos I haven’t previously shared as well.

So, for today’s blog, I thought I would experiment with some old photos from our second trip to Mt. St. Helen.

It’s pretty amazing what can be done with a photo in even relatively simple photo editing software like Aperture, my personal favorite.  In today’s gallery, I’ve posted a series of photos that are quite similar.  I processed 3 exposures using the Photomatix HDR plug-in for Aperture and created two unique exports from Photomatix.  In the one, I used more natural-looking settings.  In the other, I used an “artistic” lighting effect that made the foreground and sky look lit differently.

Then, I used my standard post-processing adjustments on them in Aperture.  Mainly, I played with highlights and shadows and the levels.  Once this was done, I made a duplicate of each version and then tried something new.

The first image used a built-in effect for black and white with a red filter.  I also pulled the black point up–many greens disappeared into the shadows.  I experimented with different combinations of lifting the shadows and then raising the black point and finally settled on this one.  It’s dark and gloomy.  I hope it shows up OK for folks–sometimes photos look brighter to me on my iMac than they do after posting to my blog.

The other crazy thing I did was with the second duplicate.  I played with tint and saturation and took the photo to the point where I thought my eyes would bleed if I looked at it any longer.  Then, I backed it off to the brink of pain.

I have no explanation for why I did this.  It just looks too purple when I look at it now.  Perhaps I thought it was time to start exploring the possibilities instead of remaining stuck in reality.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it only took a slider control to add saturation, luminance, and vibrancy to real life?

Powell’s Books

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Every town has a store that everyone who visits must go to.  It’s a rule.  If you’re going to build a town and people are going to come visit it, there must be at least one retail establishment that everyone wants to go to while they’re there.  I don’t know what this place is for a lot of towns I’ve been to, but I know it’s there.  In Portland, Powell Books is the must-see tourist store (although it seems to have a lyal local following too, which has to help financially).

I used to think the OSU library was enormous.  Towers and towers of books.  I don’t know if a city block of book is larger or not, but it sure feels bigger.  When you walk into Powell’s, you have to reference a map with a color-coded key that tells you where different types of books are.  I guess you don’t have to reference it, really.  But, having spent a considerable amount of time wandering around looking for something, I strongly advise it.

Once you figure out which wing of the building the book you’re looking for resides in, you still must navigate the building that corresponds to that selection to find it.  It’s one of those bookstores that makes you understand why bookstores have librarians on had to find books you’re looking for and direct you to it.

There was a time when I could spend an entire day wandering around a book store.  These days, only the Apple store could keep me occupied that long.  Instead of lingering among books that smell like they’ve been lingering far longer, I have gravitated to the electronic version of books.  Given that I carry an iPad and iPhone with me virtually everywhere I go, it seems like a better use of the products I already own to double up the value of my investment.

Besides, who wants to haul more than 1 big dusty volume from the 18th century or earlier?

We are at Powell’s Books with our friends from Seattle today.  They have never been inside before, so we suddenly feel like tour guides.  We step inside and consult the map.  We point to different sections of the store.  My friend wants one particular book.  she asks for assistance to find it.  It’s located right next to where we’re standing.  We go get in line, check out, and leave.  We walked out without remembering to take them through the entire building.  Some tour guides!

Shooting Elk

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I really enjoy wildlife.  The more wild, the better (well, until I start to look like dinner).  I get a bigger thrill out of seeing a deer in the park than I do at the zoo.  I get an even bigger thrill seeing a deer in the backwoods than I do at a park.  The more remote an area, the bigger the thrill.

Elk are more exciting than deer proportional to their weight.  I think there’s probably an algorithm out there that someone has developed to calculate the level of excitement any given creature produces based on their size, elusiveness, rarity, and number of people they encounter in an average year.

Seeing an elk is more exciting both because it’s bigger and because it’s more rare.  At least for someone who’s lived East of the Mississippi for most of her life it’s more rare.  Where elk can be found in the East, they have been recently reintroduced.  They wear large tags around their necks that I suspect say things like “My name is Leroy.”

I don’t know why they look less wild than their relatives in the West, but they do.  Even though it’s more likely that you’ll run into an Elk while cruising down a highway in the Canadian Rockies than in Great Smokey National Park, when you see the Elk in Great Smokey National Park, you’ll swear it’s one of the ranger’s pets.  The “more rare = more wild” equation just doesn’t hold true in the East.

What all this adds up to is an inappropriate level of excitement about seeing a bunch of elk who live about an hour from Portland.  I thought we would have the best chance of seeing the Elk at dusk, so we stopped on our way back from Astoria at the Jewell Meadows Wildlife Preserve.  Granted, the website told us that the best time to see the elk was between November and April, but since we weren’t planning to be in Oregon between November and April, we figured we’d better take our chances.  Besides, it was pretty much on the way back to my dad’s.

We did not get to see the full herd of 200 elk, but we did get to see a couple dozen elk from a distance.  I thought they would be roaming around grazing a bit more than they were–I guess they go to bed earlier on the coast.

For about the thousandth time during our trip I wished I had a lens longer than 400mm.   I shot the elk anyway, hoping the resolution of my camera would be enough to allow me to crop the heck out of the photos.  Unfortunately, the photos didn’t withstand the crop.  Between the motion of me hand-holding the camera and the motion of the elk, the images are just not sharp enough.

Regardless, I’m still glad we stopped to shoot the elk.  I’m also glad I was shooting with a camera.  🙂

The Open Road in Sepia

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Hanging out on the tip of Washington in a place called “Dismal Nitch” might sound depressing.  However, according to the National Park Service, its name was derived from the journal of Capt. William Clark who referred to the site as a “Dismal Nitch” after being stuck there for 6 days in a storm waiting for supplies.  For the Lewis and Clark expedition, it was the last miserable stop on the Columbia River between them and the Pacific ocean.

For us, it was a beautiful, sunny day that gave us great views of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, the Columbia River, and the mountains beyond.  However, having driven over the ridiculously long bridge, stopped at Dismal Nitch, watched the pelicans diving after fish, and watched the sun start to sink lower in the sky, we decided it was time to start heading back towards Portland.  We had one more stop in mind and we wanted to get there by dusk.

On the way back, I did some more “through the windows” shooting.  I’m fairly certain there is some law of photography that starts with, “Thou shalt not do landscape photography from a moving vehicle.”  Oh well, rules are made to be broken.

I know for sure there is some law of photography that says all photographers must at some point take a shot of themselves in a mirror.  I’ve resisted for a really long time.  But when I caught my reflection in the side-view mirror, my will power crumbled.  Like being drawn into a black hole, I felt compelled to press the shutter button.  Too bad I didn’t have try a slower shutter speed–it might have been interesting with the bridge blurred in the background.

Having captured some similar images of the bridge going the opposite direction, I found myself somewhat bored with today’s selection of photos.  I decided to change them all to the sepia preset.  I went a little wild with the orange tones in the first image–it evoked the idea of sunset for me.

The pairs of images are yet another semi-happy accident I wish I would have thought of when I was shooting because I would have shot them a little differently.  Maybe with the road going left and then right or something.

Regardless of what I might have shot differently or whether I shot something similar before, there is still something evocative to me about looking down the road.

What is it about an empty road that seems so prophetic?  My nomadic desires were suddenly reawakened by the sight.  The possibilities promised by going somewhere new seemed irresistible.  But on this day, the road didn’t lead to a place we hadn’t been before.  Just like life, sometimes we drive in circles.

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Pelican Jarts

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While birds are pretty darn fascinating to watch, there is no bird like a Brown Pelican for entertainment.  I don’t know what it is about watching their repetitive pattern of rising over the water, nearly hovering as they reposition their bodies for a dive, and their sudden transformation from giant seabird to giant feathered jart as they dive, leaving behind a splash that probably wouldn’t get them a gold medal if this were the Olympic diving competition.  But, I could watch them perform this dance between feast and famine over and over again.

On the Washington side of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which, if I were inclined to bet, I would bet is called “Megler,” we found a park where we could sit and watch the Brown Pelicans in their unique approach to dinner.  It’s amazing to me that such a large bird can so completely disappear under the water for several seconds after diving head first after a fish.  I feel certain the military could learn a lot from these birds.

The Brown Pelican is, in fact, the only pelican who dives from the air after its prey.  If I were a White Pelican and I watched the Brown Pelicans I shared my territory with snatching up fish from below the surface of the water this way, I would probably want to give it a try–it looks awfully fun.

Through the Glass

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There is only one thing disappointing about the Astoria Megler Bridge:  there’s no place for pedestrians.  I guess it would be expensive to add a pedestrian walkway to a bridge that spans over 4 miles, but the views from the bridge stretch over the bay to the distant mountains in Washington and back to the South in Oregon.  Plus, the pelicans and gulls fly over the bridge at eye level.  It would be a great place to shoot.

I decided to try shooting through the windshield.  I have a lot of experience shooting through car windows–one of the sadder ironies in life is that wildlife tends to be more afraid of humans walking in the woods than of cars racing down a freeway, often to their own demise.  This leads to me trying to capture images of moose, elk, bears, etc through car windows more often than on foot.

On the positive side, I have learned a few tricks.  First and always applicable, get as close to the glass as possible.  This puts all the crap stuck to the glass completely out of focus so it doesn’t show up in the photos (the spots in the last image are actually birds that were flying too fast to be in focus).

Second, if you can’t roll down the windows and stick your head out, shoot through the front windshield if you’re shooting wide angle.  There is just nothing appealing about a composition that looks like this:

Third, if you’re shooting with a long lens, it’s easier to shoot out the side window, but watch for the blasted rearview mirror.  Shoot tighter, sit cross-legged to get up higher in your seat, roll down the window and prop the lens on top of the rearview mirror (not recommended in a rapidly moving vehicle).  Do something to get that mirror out of the frame.

Fourth, don’t forget about reflections.  If you have a polarizer, you might be able to get rid of them that way.  Unfortunately, sometimes you have to live with them (like in the first photo in the gallery).

Fifth, if you’re shooting though the windshield of a car going 50+ MPH down the road and you’re trying to get lots of depth of field, you can focus on whatever spot is in front of the car and then shoot, even though the spot you just focused on is gone by the time you push the button.

Finally, if you are shooting while the car is in motion (hopefully because someone else is driving it), remember that the speed your moving affects the shutter speed you want to use, depending on whether you want sharp or blurred images.  Oh! I just had a great idea for shooting the drive down the far side of the bridge (yes, I just smacked myself in the forehead since I am not planning to be back in Portland again for a year).