Vacation – Page 4 – Post Irony

Westward Ho

By Don on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Arkansas is hot in the summer. Like, I mean, really hot. If you think you know hot, but haven’t been in the south during the summer, then you don’t know hot. And this June has been particularly hot. Easily over 90 almost every day this month. And the thermometer doesn’t tell the whole story. It always feels hotter than the thermometer says. Humidity, you know. Gina decides she needs another vacation (we just went to New York City in March) and we start looking at the heat index values in New Mexico and Colorado. It actually feels cooler there than it really is. So that settled it, a week-long jaunt through a small portion of the west. After buying a whole bunch of junk to keep Abby happy in the car, we took off.

We headed out Interstate 40, which follows the route of the famous Route 66 through western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and into New Mexico. Route 66 artifacts are a big deal to a lot of people and lot of photographers, so I decided I wanted to see some Route 66 icons and shoot a few photos. After our first night on the road in Elk City, Okla., we pulled off the Interstate early the next morning in Shamrock, Texas, to check the famous Conoco Tower station. The billboards said it has been featured in movies.

We rolled into Las Vegas, N.M., and had lunch at the Landmark Grill in the historic Plaza Hotel. I had the Santa Fe french dip and it was just OK. The hotel retains a 19th Century feel with lots of well-aged wood in the floors and walls.

We hit Taos, N.M., for a two-night stay. Taos is full of adobe and pottery and buckskin. It’s almost exactly like Hot Springs, but with western-themed kitsch instead of southern-themed kitsch. And without the oppressive, soul-crushing humidity. And you can go skiing nearby in the winter. Actually, I guess it’s only like Hot Springs in the kitschy crap category.

We stopped at a shop devoted to chocolate and Abby got a caramel apple.

Taos is home to a lot of artists and hippie-types selling their wares. It’s also home to a phenomenon known as the Taos Hum. I meant to spend a few quiet moments outside of town listening for the hum, but I forgot all about it until a couple days after we got home, obviously too late.

Taos is fertile ground for window and door photos.

Not every artist can make a go of it. Maybe this outfit relied too much on the power of its logo.

New York City Vacation

Hillbillies And The City: Day 5

By Don on Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I told Gina before we left for NYC there were two things I wanted to do for sure, one of them was to go to Brooklyn and shoot the sunset over lower Manhattan. The sleet and snow and overcast finally went away on our last full day in the city, so the plan was to go to Brooklyn, eat some authentic NYC pizza and watch the sunset on the banks of the East River. But we still needed something to do in the meantime. After much hemming and hawing we decided to go visit the Museum of Modern Art to get a little high culture.

New York City Vacation

Hillbillies And The City: Day 4

By Don on Monday, May 9, 2011

I’m a big fan of sandwiches. It’s just a perfect food form. So one of the two things I told Gina I wanted to do in NYC for sure was to go to a classic New York City deli. We slept in on Day 4 and headed to Katz’s Deli in the Lower East Side. I got a corned beef sandwich, aka a Ruben without the horrifyingly awful sauerkraut. It was excellent. Katz’s is one of those places that’s now famous for being famous. They’ve got hundreds of signed celebrity photos all over the walls and they really play up the fact that the fake orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally” was filmed there.

New York City Vacation

Hillbillies And The City: Day 3

By Don on Thursday, April 21, 2011

As part of our commitment to go full-on tourist, we hit the Empire State Building first thing and got near the front of the massive line to go to the top. This is the view looking south at the Financial District on the tip of Manhattan. There’s a big gap there now where the Twin Towers once stood. We didn’t have to try very hard at the full-on tourist thing. We got off the subway with little idea of where to go so we consulted the map on my iPhone. The little dot indicating the location of the ESB appeared to be on the next block over. We started pointing and talking about what route to take to get there when I looked up and there was the damn ESB right above us.

New York City Photography traveling Vacation

Hillbillies And The City – Day 2

By Don on Saturday, April 2, 2011

Day 2 dawned miserable. Rainy and chilly. So we decided to get some indoor touristing out of the way. We hit the subway for the first time and rode the uptown C train from the 50 Street Station to the American Museum of Natural History. The subway stopped in the basement of the museum. In the lobby were probably 1,000 people in line for tickets. The museum probably loves cold and rainy weather. Also in the lobby was a super-tall skeleton of a barosaurus.

New York City Photography Vacation

Hillbillies And The City – Day 1

By Don on Tuesday, March 29, 2011

For years Gina agitated for a New York City vacation and this year, with my characteristic magnanimity, I decided to grant her wish. (Your B.S. detector should be screaming right now.) Several people expressed surprise that I would go to New York for a vacation. I guess because I’m usually a national park/driving cross country kind of guy. But NYC is one of those places everyone should see, right? Also I knew NYC would be a fantastic place to take photos, so I got pretty excited about going. The only time I’d been in the East Coast Megalopolis was way back in the summer after 8th grade when I went to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives for a few weeks.

Big Bend National Park Photography Texas Vacation

The Bend! Day 4: Crossing The Rubicon

By Don on Thursday, April 8, 2010

I’ll admit that I’m not much of camper. I love going out into the wilderness and rambling around and I’ll camp out if that’s the only way I’ll be able to visit some places, but I don’t like it. The whole camping thing is just such a hassle. Screwing with ice chests and camp stoves and flashlights and cooking outdoors and not bathing and participating in different bathroom routines is all bothersome but not really that big a deal. The thing that gets me is the tent. First you have to put the damn thing up and arrange some kind of bedding. Then you have to hope it doesn’t rain (admittedly not a great danger in the desert). Then to get up to pee in the middle of the night you have to use to the preternaturally loud zipper, which wakes up your tentmate(s) and possibly other nearby campers. And, if you’re in a campground, to pee in the night you have to put on pants and shoes and walk to the restroom. In addition, there’s the dish washing in cold water and the constant not being able to find things. Eventually you have to take down the tent and put up the bedding. It just sucks.

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Big Bend National Park Photography Texas Vacation

The Bend! Day 3: ¡Viva Terlingua!

By Don on Friday, April 2, 2010

We got all rested up on Day 2 and we were ready to tackle some more desert hiking on Day 3 (or at least I was). We planned to meet Dale and Amber at 8 a.m. at the Pine Canyon trail head, but we got off to a late start after another rough night in the tent. A gale blew up and pummeled our cheapo Wal-Mart tent for hours. If you’ve never slept in a tent with a 35 mph wind blowing then you haven’t lived, my friend. I finally went to sleep around 1 a.m. and Gina was awake until the wind calmed down sometime around 3. Plus we had to take down our tent and pack up because checkout of the campsite was at noon. So we showed up at the trail a little over an hour late. Luckily Dale and Amber got there only about 30 minutes before we did and were inclined to wait for us. There’s very little cellular reception in the park, so we couldn’t communicate with each other. We were all going on plans we’d made the last time we saw each other two days earlier.

Big Bend National Park Hiking Photography Texas Vacation

The Bend! Day 2: Chasing The Sunset

By Don on Thursday, April 1, 2010

I had another long hike planned for the second day at Big Bend National Park, but the hike the afternoon before wore Gina and me out pretty good. Plus we had some inconsiderate campers in the site next to ours and they were whooping it up late into the night. At about 11 p.m. they were talking loudly about the cobbler they were cooking in a Dutch oven. Only about 15 yards separated them from the nearest other campers – us, and several other campsite were close by, but they acted as if they were 100 miles from other people. A little bit of excitement ensued earlier in the evening when a skunk invaded their campsite. To top it all off, they started being loud at about daylight. So they were the last thing we heard before going to sleep and the first thing we heard upon waking up.

We decided to scrap any plans for strenuous hiking for the day and instead went for drive on the west side of the park to see what we could see.

Big Bend National Park Hiking Photography Texas Vacation

The Bend!

By Don on Tuesday, March 30, 2010

It only took 14 years, but I finally talked Gina into returning to Big Bend National Park for a camping trip. Her first trip, in 1996, got off to a shaky start when we rolled into the campground and the thermometer at the little store showed 114 degrees. In hindsight, it’s clear that visiting the desert during the last week of May is a bad idea if you’re not a big fan of heat. Then there was the fact that we went there in my little Ford Ranger that didn’t have air conditioning. Then there was the late-night incident with the javelina. Then there was the sandstorm that blew in and drove tiny grains of sand through the tent fabric, coating us in grit. We cut the trip short after three days and fled back to comparatively mild Little Rock.

This time, with a March trip planned, the weather promised to be much more reasonable and it was. It was even pretty chilly during the nights. Granted, I haven’t been many places in my life, but Big Bend is the most beautiful, scenic and downright neatest place I’ve ever been. This trip was my third to the park. I shot about 500 pictures and have picked out about 40 to put on the blog, so I’m going to dole them out over the next few days as I find time to get the photos processed. If you want to stretch you’re imagination, you can pretend I’m doing these entries in real time even though the trip was actually last week. I recommend you do that.