Memphis!
We scored a rare free weekend and flipped a coin to decide whether to go to Memphis! or take Daisy out for the first camping trip of 2012. Memphis! won out after a two-out-of-three flip session. In eastern Arkansas we came upon a double rainbow that just wouldn’t go away. After about 15 minutes of driving with it right outside the window we decided to pull over and partake of its glory.
We really wanted to go to Memphis! in order to eat at Rendezvous. In the past, we’ve gotten over that way at least once a year, but we let three years go by this time. Abby was two the last time we ate the succulent dry-rubbed BBQ, so she didn’t remember just how great it is.
Her eyes fired up when she took that first chomp. And rightly so. The restaurant was hitting on all cylinders that night.
We hit Mud Island the next day. The poles at the marina are marked with the high-water level from last year’s epic floods.
Mud Island is home to a half-mile long scale replica of the lower Mississippi River, which is extremely neato. It’s a great place for kids because they can get in the water and splash around. Abby looks like a giantess standing athwart the mightiest river in North America.
And this guy in a kayak looks like a tiny ant man compared to the full monty of Ol’ Man River.
San Antonio – Day 5
On our final full day in San Antone I got up at the butt crack of dawn to shoot the Alamo when it wouldn’t be swarmed with tourists and vendors hawking to the tourists. It was pretty neat being the only person visiting the Alamo besides the grounds crew blowing off the walkway with super loud industrial strength leaf blowers.
Around the corner from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.
Gina brought up the idea of making a jaunt down to the border, but I had a vague idea that that part of the border was a bad place to be. I was right. But I came across a pamphlet touting the San Antonio Market Square. It’s a two-block area of shops filled with Mexican tourist crap. It’s as if they brought the border two hours north so that we could experience a different culture without being decapitated and our gutted carcasses stuffed with cocaine. It was a great place to take pictures because everything was colorful and arrayed in interesting patterns. I was happy to see that these Lucha Libre masks were a real thing and not just a prop from a bad Jack Black movie.
A lot of Virgin Mary kitsch going on in that place.
Judging from the amount of stock, the most popular item for border tourists are theCatrina dolls of Dia de los Muertos fame. Gina bought a doll decked out in a wedding dress. The doll. Not Gina.
It’s apparently a thing in Texas to take pictures of your kids among the blue bonnets. We found a good patch on the outskirts of the city and forced Abby to sit for a portrait. A man and his two kids were there doing the same thing.
I didn’t have any light modifiers with me so I used two plastic Walgreens bags as a makeshift softbox. As much as I’d like to chalk this idea up to being a genius, I had recently seen this technique demonstrated on the Strobist blog.
Gina served as my voice-activated light stand.
San Antonio – Day 4
We kicked off our third day by hitting a caverns tour in the morning. It was really dark underground so no pictures. The next morning we hit the Alamo, a short walk under the interstate from our hotel. It turns out that Texas takes the Alamo way too seriously. When we walked in the front door I was immediately accosted for wearing a hat. You see, the Alamo is a shrine and any arbitrary form of disrespect is met with swift and brutal consequences. It’s not OK to wear a hat inside the Alamo, but it’s perfectly fine to operate a money grubbing souvenir stand selling the usual crappy items aimed at tourists and their kids. For all the love of the Alamo, it’s not even a very good museum. The exhibits are sparse and do only a superficial job of explaining the history. Also, photos aren’t allowed. I got the top photo of the best exhibit in the place by putting my camera on its super-spy-silent mode and firing from the hip.
Gina and Abby bolted to the nearby children’s museum while I wandered downtown taking pictures.
The Texas spring break was the week before we were there.
We spent the late afternoon and evening at the River Walk.
Giving Thanks
Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. This one was pretty much like the last several. We cooked the turkey per Alton Brown’s instructions and it turned out great again. I didn’t produce much in the way of great photos. The actual meal was a little fragmented because we didn’t get the food on the table until just before the Hogs started playing. We served buffet style and so didn’t load down the table with bowls and serving dishes filled with feastables, which would have made the pictures better.
Halloween Fun
Gramps had a big time with his Frankenstein mask.
Abby making her jack-o-lantern face.
Like Looking For A Diamond In a Giant Dirt Field
A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.
Abbydon Productions Inc. LLC Presents
Abby and I were looking for something to do inside out of the heat that didn’t involve watching TV, so we decided to get into the movie making bidness. We decided to give Pixar a run for their money by making a stop motion animation short as our first project. We needed a camera dolly, so I strapped my camera to the top of Abby’s Barbie VW Beetle. I positioned the camera for each shot and took care of the focusing. Abby moved the train between frames and pushed the camera’s shutter button. She also helped solve the problem of keeping the train positioned on the bridge approaches without rolling backward or forward. We’re thinking of doing a frame-for-frame homage to “Citizen Kane” for our next effort.
Into The Earth
It’s been so hot for so long here that 105 degree days are no longer remarkable. A couple weeks ago we decided to hit the coolest spot in the state that’s not inside a building: Blanchard Springs Caverns. Abby referred to it as going into the earth.
Meet Daisy
We’ve replaced Ol’ Leaky with a new pop-up camper. Abby christened it Daisy. Daisy has a number of improvements over OL, namely she doesn’t leak. And she has an air conditioner, a refrigerator and she doesn’t have that odd smell that OL had. Because Abby named the thing Daisy we thought it would be clever to take her to Daisy State Park on Lake Greeson for her maiden voyage. The temperature was approaching Hell levels so we knew it would be a stern test for the air conditioner. I didn’t have high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised. The camper stayed quite cool, probably in the high 70′s while it was 100 outside. I even had to turn it down during the night.
Summer Snow And Sand
When we got up on our third day in Taos, we could see new snow on the mountain tops and decided to go back up to Taos Ski Village to check it out.
After an hour in the ski village, admiring the various view of snow capped mounatins, we took off for Colorado.
On the outskirts of San Luis, Colo., we stopped at a historical marker to take in the view of the fresh snow on the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The marker said the irrigation ditch in the foreground is the San Luis People’s Ditch, dug in the 1850′s by the community and the oldest operating irrigation apparatus in the state. After San Luis we stopped off in Fort Garland to eat some of the worst road food I’ve ever had at the Cowboy Cafe. Then we visited the town’s grocery store, inside of which it remains 1975. Pretty charming actually.
Our next stop was Great Sand Dunes National Park where we had reservations at the Great Sand Dunes Lodge. Gina and I visited the sand dunes back in 1998, but only stayed there for an hour or so and barely made it past the parking lot. I’ve always wanted to go back and hike out into the dunes. We trudged about a quarter of a mile across a sandy flat to reach the first dune. When we got there Abby threw herself on the ground and started rolling in the sand.
At one point we lost her as she went rolling down the side of a dune. The wind was gusty and strong at times. The strong gusts lifted a layer of sand about a foot thick up off the ground. I guess the sand was too heavy to go any higher, need a stronger wind for that. Abby, in an amazed voice, said, “Look at the sand! It’s glowing!” The sun was shining down through the layer of blown sand and from a low angle it did indeed look like the sand surface was glowing.
The sand dunes are major geological wonder. Erosion carries sand out of the mountains and onto the vast Rio Grande Valley. The southerly winds pick that sand back up and carry it toward the Sangre de Cristos. But wind blowing downslope out of the mountains stops the southerlies and the sand drops out. Over the eons a huge dune field has formed. And although the dune field is huge, it doesn’t extend all along the mountains. Conditions are only right in one area of the valley for dune formation.
Here’s a shot of some people for perspective. Some of the individual dunes are immense. The tallest dune is 750 feet.
The lodge is situated just outside the park. Each room has a back patio with this view. I think that tallest mountain is the 14,294 foot Crestone Peak.
I took Abby and Gina to the lodge and went back out on the dunes to shoot some photos in the magic hour light.
The wind became constant and stronger as the afternoon wore on. That foot-thick layer of airborne sand was everywhere. The ground in most of my photos looks a little blurry because of the blowing sand. I liked this one because my shadow was extended beyond the rim of this dune because it was falling on the sand being blown past the edge. At one point I laid my tripod down and the wind created a tripod shaped sand drift. Also, sand stuck to every slightly lubricated part of the tripod. It’s still gritty.
Medano Creek runs along the edge of the dunes and is a big draw for dune tourists. The creek normally runs well into June, but this year the mountains had a smaller than usual snowpack and the creek was going dry by mid-June. You can actually go to the place where the creek ends and watch it soak into the sand.
While I was messing around shooting the end of the creek I turned around and saw this awesome sunset spectacle over Blanca Peak, the tallest mountain in the Sangre de Cristos at 14,345 feet.
High Points And Low Points
For day 2 in Taos we headed into the mountains to see Taos Ski Valley and do a short hike. A little snow remained at the highest elevations and the snow melt creeks were running pretty well. We found this waterfall right below the idle ski lift.
The mountains are criss-crossed by miles of hiking trails, all of which had serious elevation gains. We chose the trail to Williams Lake. The trailhead was at around 10,000 feet and the lake is above 11,000, so we didn’t expect to be able to do the entire 4-mile round trip. But we made it about halfway before turning back. The trail followed a beautiful snow melt creek and the whole area was covered with Douglas fir Christmas trees.
We stopped at one point for a snack. We dug out some chips and cookies and a gang of four or five birds descended upon us looking for their share of the food. They got so close that it was unnerving at first. They would come close enough to eat cookie pieces off our shoes, but they couldn’t quite commit to eating out of our hands.
For some reason they pipe the melt water from somewhere up above into the trail-side creek.
More snow melt.
We headed back to Taos so Abby could visit a toy store she found the day before in this alley off the town square. Unfortunately, the store was already closed, so we headed up to the other end of the alley to eat at one of the town’s highly touted restaurants. As we started off, Abby squealed and I looked down to see a big splash of blood hit her leg. She’s prone to nosebleeds and the super dry air had taken its toll on her nasal passages. She immediately clamped her nose shut with her fingers just like the doctor showed her to do. The nosebleed was minor and she got it under control quickly, but she didn’t want to go inside any restaurant for fear the bleeding would start again in front of a bunch of strangers. We decided to just drive through Wendy’s and head out to the Rio Grande gorge to watch the sunset.
The gorge slices through the bottom of a flat valley. You can’t see it until you get right to it. The main attraction is the Gorge Bridge that passes 650 feet above the river, the nation’s fifth highest bridge. It’s such a big tourist attraction that people set up tables in the parking area to sell all manner of tourist geegaws and other items. One guy was selling tools, wrenches, socket sets, screwdrivers. I guess he wasn’t afraid of competing with Wal-Mart. It’s also apparently a big draw for the suicidal. We walked out to the middle of the bridge and looked around. I found it hard to get a decent photo of either the bridge or the gorge. Tall fences and big warning signsare meant to prevent the adventurous from leaving the highway right-of-way so I couldn’t really get to place for a good angle for a photo.
Tiny Dancer
Abby’s first dance recital was on Sunday. It’s amazing because she dissolved into tears during the makeshift practice recital back in December and vowed to not participate in the June recital. Well she did and she did great. The video is from Saturday’s dress rehearsal because no one was allowed to take photos or videos of the real thing.
Daffy Day
We made our annual trip to Wye Mountain a couple of weeks ago to see the daffodils. Abby’s Mimi was on hand for this year’s trip.
Fat Tuesday
Gina’s birthday was last week and since it was actually before Mardi Gras this year Abby and I decided to do a Mardi Gras themed celebration. We got a MG cake and a MG party kit that included beads and masks.
Then we headed to Shogun for a birthday feast. Abby pulled that thing where she hates something that she should get a huge kick out of. When we got there I asked the hostess if they do a birthday thing and she said they did so I requested it. The whole staff came over and sang happy birthday in Japanese and our chef banged on this huge drum.
Snowpocalypse
The weather people spent several days predicting a snowmageddon for central Arkansas and Abby went into overdrive in anticipation of the gloriousness she was sure was coming. At one point she said, “I can’t wait. We’re going to wear mittens and have snowball fights and drink hot chocolate.” The snow finally began coming down Sunday afternoon and it was better than Christmas.
Can’t Catch Me
Gina went out of town earlier this week for a four-day business trip. Right after she left Abby had one of her great ideas: “Let’s make gingerbread men as a surprise for Mom when she comes home.” I have no idea where she came up with this. We’ve never made gingerbread men at our house and we’ve never bought any that I can remember. But because I’m a great dad I told her it was a great idea. She said, “OK let’s go.” I told her we’d better wait until the day before Mom came home so the cookies would be fresh. Everyday thereafter when I’d pick her up from school she’d ask if we were going to make gingerbread men. She’d then sulk for an hour or so when I said “three more days, two more days,” etc. I found a recipe on the Internets and went and bought all the ingredients and when the day came Abby and I went to a local kitchen store and bought big, medium and small gingerbread man cookie cutters.
I hauled out my trusty twin SB-600s and two shoot-through umbrellas to capture what promised to be a magical father-daughter evening. Also I figured the gingerbread men would make good subjects to shoot with the beater macro lens I recently bought on eBay.
Turkey Days
We were so full of the Thanksgiving spirit we had to put on two full-on dinners. Gina’s Mom and Dad came down for a Wednesday night dinner and then we had a bigger dinner on Saturday with my parents and sisters and a few friends.
For some reason I didn’t take a photo of everyone around the table at the second dinner, but I did get a before and after shot of the succulent turkey I prepared using the Alton Brown brining and roasting technique.
Camping Fools
For the second week in a row, and the third time in a month, we took Ol’ Leaky out for some camping action. It rained. Ol’ Leaky, as you might expect, leaked. It wasn’t too bad though. The rain was quite heavy but it didn’t last long. We stayed dry and warm and caught the leaks with a towel and a bucket.
We went to Lake Ouachita State Park on the eastern end of Lake Ouachita, Arkansas’ largest lake. I’d never been to the lake before, so we got to see a new-to-us area. The campground itself was excellent, complete with electric, water and sewer, though we didn’t use the sewer.
Shiver Me Timbers!
A couple weekends ago we loaded up for a trip to Branson to see Mimi, Papa and Meemaw. Abby has for some reason took a liking to miniature golf so we took the unprecedented step of visiting two mini golf establishments in a single day. First up was a pirate-themed course complete with pirate ship. Abby and I jumped up on the ship’s afterdeck to take a turn at the wheel. I yelled “Avast!” a couple of times.
95 Years Young
Over the Fourth of July weekend, Gina, Abby and I trekked up to Southeast Kansas to visit my parents and Grandma Dailey, whose 95th birthday was on July 9. Gina thoughtfully picked up a couple of gifts and cards before we left Little Rock.
Happy Fathers Day
Classic Fathers Day. Abby made me the traditional breakfast in bed and then we went out to pick wild red plums to make some Uncle Slappy’s Plum Delicious Red Plum Jelly. It was hot. By the time we were through Abby and I were pouring water over our heads to cool us off enough to walk back to the car.
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