Every fall I intend to go out and shoot some epic fall foliage and every year I seem to miss the great color. So the third week in October we planned to take Daisy up in the Ozarks and do the classic-fall-foliage-gawking thing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find an RV park with hookups that had any vacancies for that weekend. We had to settle for a hotel room in Harrison.
We love us some state fair. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented us from going at the prime picture-taking time of dusk, so I had to fight a high sun and bald skies.
Abby started first grade a few weeks ago in a new school. Normally for such an occasion I would’ve had the ghetto studio fired up, but since we had just moved, chaos reigned. I had to do with the poor light on the back deck just before we left to drop her off.
We leave Abby at Nana and Gramps’ for a day and look what happens.
The next day we took her out on a local highway and let her go.
Abby got it into her head several months ago that she wanted to go to the beach. I think she heard Gina and me talking about our past adventures in the Redneck Riviera. Then we were talking one night in early June about taking a summer vacation and I asked Abby her thoughts on the matter. “I’d like to go to the beach, IF SOMEONE WOULD TAKE ME (emphasis hers),” she replied testily. Since she generally gets her way, we started making plans to drive to Destin, Fla. We knew it was short notice and it might be hard to find a decent place to stay, but Gina called the condo in Miramar Beach where we had stayed five years ago and a room was available. It being such short notice they agreed to give us the room at a slight discount from the normal rate. You can never tell if Abby is going to like something that is obviously fun to the rest of the world, so we were prepared to see her balk at going into the ocean. But she ran right in and acted like it was the greatest thing in the world.
The surf was up pretty decently (the red flags were out) and on our second day we went and bought a couple of wave boards and Abby jumped on hers and started belly surfing like she’d been doing it her whole life.
I’ve always scoffed at the “tradition” of holding graduation for any students before the end of high school – until I saw Abby’s kindergarten graduation. She learned how to read in kindergarten. I couldn’t read as well as she does until I was well into elementary school.
I went out to Knoop Park to try and get some pics of the highly touted super moon. I was half expecting to be disappointed, but the moon was pretty spectacular rising over the modest Little Rock skyline. I got a couple so-so photos of it.
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.
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.
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.