Before The Blog: My Favourite Photos, Part II, Condo Week Trips

Haven't seen Part One of this post? Here's a link! 

 We started taking "Condo Week" trips in 2004. Here are my favourite pictures from each of those trips, up to the point where I started writing blog posts about each trip over the last 23 years. (We gave the time-share to our niece and nephew one year, so they could have a nice trip to Hawaii before their first child was born, and to our two nephews another year, so they could go play among the rocks with their Jeeps. So no photos from those two years.)

 

2004: Ogden, Utah

 That first Condo Week was a kind of last-minute thing. Our time-share is in Corpus Christi, Texas, but there's always been a system in place where it could be exchanged for condos in other places. This was the first year I actually looked into doing that, and by the time I did, there wasn't much available at a good time for us. So, you know ... Ogden. We flew up to Salt Lake City, and my sister in law and her husband met us there, having driven over from Colorado. 

 The photo of Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake, that I put in Part 1 of this post, is really my favourite photo from that first trip. Since I had a film camera at the time, there weren't all that many pictures to choose from. But here is my Second-Favourite, a shot of the first magpie I ever saw. 

 

I did get a better picture of a magpie the following year, in Wyoming, but at the time this was, to me, a really special sighting, and the picture still brings to mind how excited I was to see such a beautiful bird.  

 This is a picture of a couple of buffalo on Antelope Island that year. It's not the photo I remember taking, but it's similar. The one I remember is framed and hanging on a wall in my living room with a couple of hundred other photos, and apparently when I was scanning all  those pictures into digital files, I missed that one. Or maybe I just can't find it. This is close, though.

 I was going to put in a link to the Trip Report, but had forgotten that I only started this blog in 2009. So, quick summary of the trip, in the form of clearest memories: Golden Spike National Monument, with its train museum and description of the building of the transcontinental railroad; riding a steam train at Park City; a walking tour of downtown Salt Lake City; a scary drive along a cliff edge to get to the condo; and a tour of the Egyptian Theater in some small town; for some reason I associate that with Chris, our younger nephew. I don't know why. And, of course, the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island.

 If you want to see more from that trip, here's a link to the on-line album: 2004-09 Ogden 

 

2005: Jackson Hole

  For our second Condo Trip, we all drove up to Jackson Hole and spent a week seeing Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was in late October and early November, so there was snow on the ground, many park facilities were closed, and there were absolutely no crowds at all, even at Old Faithful. Definitely an excellent time to visit those places.

I know, it's a pretty trite tourist shot, but (a) I was still using film, so I don't have a whole lot to choose among; and (2) it's still about the best shot I got in the Parks. 

When we were at Grand Teton, the sky was overcast and everything came out kind of grey. Because of that, even the pictures of my first sightings of various wildlife aren't among my favourites: grizzly bears, elk, moose ... I like those pictures, but there's nothing special about them. And although everybody who goes to Yellowstone stands in the same spot where I stood and takes the same snapshot, the picture on the left represents the trip in my mind.

 And here, by the way, is a better picture of a magpie:

 

Clearest memories of the trip: seeing the big-name wildlife for the first time has to be the top memory. Grizzly bears, elk and moose. And there was a spot along the road where we stopped to look out across a distant meadow, and we saw what looked like a pack of wolves loping along a trail in the middle distance. 

On-line photo album: 2005-10 Yellowstone (Jackson Hole) 

2006: Branson

I'm not sure about the others, but I kind of resisted going to Branson. To me, it was like going to Las Vegas, but without the casinos: a lot of tawdry touristy stuff aimed at small children and small minds. 

 I wasn't wrong, but we still managed to have a good time. We actually went to the Six-Flags style amusement park they have there, among other tawdry touristy stuff, and took in enough of the other basse-classe crap to give my snobbishness a full workout. Enjoyed every minute of it, I think, except the infamous Doughnut Incident, which Sherry may never live down. Lesson Learned: We can have a good time in each others' company anywhere, as long as Sherry doesn't get control of the pastries.

 This picture is of the reservoir that wraps around one side of the town. We drove up above it after riding the Branson Belle, a stern-wheel steamboat. When I see this picture I get a feeling of calmness that, as far as I recall, I didn't actually feel at the time; but it has adjusted my memory of the trip.

  Clearest memories: the Arkansas Natural Bridge, on the way up from Little Rock; the ventriloquist show on the Branson Belle; the view of our condo from the top of the roller-coaster at that amusement park; seeing Yaakov Smirnov do stand-up comedy at his theater; the county-counting drive up to Wilson's Creek Battlefield; and the horrible collared greens at an Arkansas state park on the way back to Little Rock at the end of the trip.

Photo album: 2006-09 Branson

 

2007: Corpus Christi

 I forget why we even went to Corpus for our Condo Week. Was it because we had never been together? Sherry and I had been several times, and it felt like we saw the same things over and over. But 2007 was the year that I switched from film to a digital camera; and it was the year I really started taking long trips in my first convertible; most notably, the Big Trip to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, the Black Hills, and into Ontario, then down to the Finger Lakes in New York. It was at the end of that 10,000-mile, five-week trip that I decided life was too short to spend it in Indiana, so I just got on a freeway and went home. 

 Anyway, it would appear that I didn't take any photos of our 2007 Corpus Christi Condo Week trip. All the pictures I expected to find in my on-line album came from later trips to North Padre. I'm not sure if I have any memories that are actually from that trip, either, although I'm sure we went to the USS Lexington and the Texas State Aquarium. Because we do those things on pretty much every trip to Corpus.

 

2008: Williamsburg, Virginia

 

Sherry and I took about an extra week on the drive up to Williamsburg, to see sights along the way. This shot is of one of the many, many memorials erected by various states and army units to commemorate the thousands who died in the battle of Shiloh, in Tennessee, during the Civil War. This one is the Iowa State Memorial, which I thought was among the most poignant in design, as is the inscription:

Brave of the brave, the twice five thousand men

Who all that day stood in the battle's shock

Fame holds them dear, and with immortal pen

Inscribes their names on the enduring rock 

I can't pretend to understand the battle. The historical park is too spread out, and too many details are shown, and for someone like me who only knows the major points of the story, it's too jumbled to really make sense. But it's an important place in our history, and this particular photo provokes strong memories of our visit there.

This trip also was the occasion for our first visit to the Smoky Mountains. This picture on the left was taken from a lookout high up on one of the mountains there, a fairly strenuous hike. It was a particularly beautiful spot, despite the overcast sky, and while there are other parts of our visit that I remember better -- crossing a creek, for example, on a narrow log and climbing up steps carved through a gap with low-hanging rocks; the fauna that even I stopped to take pictures of; the blueness of the distant mountains -- this is the photo that I most enjoy seeing from that part of the trip.

Williamsburg is filled with artisans demonstrating trades and crafts of the early English colonial era. I have photos of coopers and blacksmiths and masons; of tailors and oxmen and soldiers, all demonstrating how things were done in the pre-Revolutionary 17th Century, when the town was the seat of government in Virginia. This particular photo is the one I like best. It's from a demonstration of the bookbinder's art, showing the pattern of a brass embossing tool used for the spines of books.

One of our side-trips during this Condo Week was to Jamestown, not far away. The site is entirely reconstructed and entirely too neatly done to really please me. It seems more amusement park than historical park, and it doesn't seem as well done or authoritative in its reconstruction as something done by the National Park Service. This reconstructed sailing vessel of the time is similar in terms of the feeling it provokes, but as a photograph it serves well to recall to mind the amazement I felt as I walked around on it and thought about what it must have been like to travel so far with so many people in such a small ship with so little understanding of what dangers might arise on the vasty ocean.

Other highlights of the trip: Corinth, Mississippi (Civil War battle); the Jack Daniels Distillery; driving the Foothills Parkway and the Blue Ridge Parkway; Appamatox Courthouse; the Petersburg battlefield (the site of the Battle of the Crater, the story that opens the wonderful novel, Cold Mountain); and a visit to William and Mary University. There was also an historical marker east of Appamatox about the Confederacy's Last Train, or something like that, which recounted an amusing story.

There are so many pictures from this trip that they got divided into two on-line albums. The drive up, as far as the Virginia state line, is in the album

2008-05.1, Virginia trip, outbound; 

the rest of the trip's pictures are in 

2008-05.2, Virginia, there and back again.

 

After that first trip to Williamsburg in 2008, I started this blog, and I'm pretty sure I posted travelogues of each Condo Week, with some photos included and a link to on-line albums where you can see the others. It may, therefore be kind of redundant to continue a post of my favourite pics from subsequent Condo Week trips ... but my anal-retentive nature says I have to do it. So keep your eyes peeled for Part 3 of My Favourite Photos, coming soon to a sleep clinic near you. (It might end up just being links to the various travelogues, but I am mindful of the real purpose of these posts -- to collect my favourite photographs.)

Film At Eleven! My Favourite Photos: Part I

I've taken a lot of photographs over the years. Some few of them are, I think, pretty good. Just by chance: I don't really know much about photography as art or science. I just take pictures, and sometimes I get lucky.

I enjoy them, anyway, even if they're not technical master works. Maybe I like the subject, or the composition, or some other ineffable quality about them.

I've started quite a few times to collect the ones I think are best. Each time, though, I get bogged down in the sheer number of pictures. (There are something like 10,000 of them, mostly since I got a digital camera in about 2007.) So I've given up on the idea of having them printed in a coffee-table book. I've decided what I will do instead -- since this post, like any subsequent post in this series, is just for my own enjoyment -- is just go through them all, more or less chronologically, and put up the ones I particularly like. (I hope other people enjoy them too.) 

This post covers the time before I started using digital cameras. Back when I used film, I didn't take that many pictures, as it cost a lot to get them developed, and most of them really weren't very good except as memories. These few are the best of that batch:

1984

 This is a shot of my feet on a chair in Piazza San Marco in Venice. I had just finished that bottle of wine, so was in a mellow mood, despite being on my own in such a place. If I remember right, I was pissed off at the two people I was travelling with. Something to do with expectations and luggage.

Twenty years later, seeing this picture after converting everything to a digital form, I decided I liked the idea of pictures of my feet in various places, and so started an album called "Feet On the Ground," which now contains more than 40 pictures of my feet in various places where the thought of taking the photo occurs to me. Many of them provoke unusually powerful memories of places. (The ones that don't are taken on ground so unremarkable that I have to read the captions I wrote to know where they were taken.)

 

1984

 I took a pretty good number of photos in Oxford, being partial to the architecture of the place as well as its academic aura. Unfortunately, when the film was developed, everything came out with a sort of yellowish cast to it. Maybe it was the quality of the light on the cloudy day I was there; maybe it was my ignorance of photography; or maybe it's because everything around the old part of town actually is kind of yellowish. Whatever the reason, this one picture is the only one I took that I think has any kind of quality to it. The composition was easy, because of the slit window in Carfax Tower that looks across to the Exeter College chapel a short distance away.  But I still take credit for composing it. 

 

1984

 This is the interior of The Monument, a tower built in the 1670s to commemorate the Great Fire of London. I just happened across it while walking through the town, and (back when I was physically able) could never resist the opportunity to climb things like this. The view from the top wasn't particularly compelling -- the only thing I clearly recall seeing is some old battleship moored in the Thames -- but this remains one of my favourite photos from my first visit to London.

1986

Elk Mountain. I had just moved to Wyoming, and was travelling west from Laramie to do some field work in the Wind River valley, when I first saw this mountain from the freeway. It's at the northern end of the Front Range, which in Wyoming is called the Laramie Mountains. Interstate 80 loops around it on the way west, causing the aspect of the mountain to changes dramatically as you move along.

Coming back a few days later, I snapped this picture. In every season and at every time of day or night and from every point along the freeway, this mountain's appearance changes so much you would hardly know it's the same mountain; but from every perspective it possesses a certain grandeur that sets it apart in my mind from all the other beautiful mountains I've seen. It represents all of Wyoming to me, and even though I only passed about a year and a half living there, it's one of the places in the world I most love.

 

1987

 

I was living in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I went with a group of friends to see what Frontier Days, the town's big annual celebration, was all about: mainly a rodeo (of which the only thing I remember is something called the Chuck Wagon Races, sort of a demolition derby for Conestoga wagons), but there was also a car show (the first I ever went to), and this: an air show by the Air Force Thunderbirds. Despite having only a little Kodak camera and not much in the way of talent, I managed to get several good pictures of the aeronautic daredevilry, good enough that I can recall from the photos what was going on, and how exciting it was to see. Sadly, the aging prints I have of those pictures have suffered over the years, but this one still is in good shape, and I'm proud of not only having captured the action but at having gotten enough of the contrail in the frame to make for a pleasing photograph. 

 

1999

 

 Fast forward a dozen years. By the time I took this picture, of red, white and blue flowers on the balcony of our house in San Antonio, I was using a fairly nice Pentax SLR camera, with interchangeable lenses and a few artsy-fartsy filters. This one uses something called a "spot filter" to give it the blurry effect around the central point of the frame. It's probably the only time I got a really good picture using that filter, and I like the picture enough that, when I switched to a digital camera I bought such a filter for the new machine. (I think I've used it once to good effect, and overused it on way too many other occasions.) But I mainly like this picture because it's the only time we ever had really nice flowers on the balcony.

 

1999

We took a day-trip out of Phoenix once, down to Tumacacori, Arizona, and on the way stopped here, at Mission San Xavier del Bac, on the Tohono O'odham Reservation outside Tucson. An interesting place altogether, but for me the best part of the visit was getting this photograph. I forget what I did to make the sky look so dark in the background -- it was actually a washed-out too-bright blue, as is usual in that part of the world -- but with the white of the church's walls I really like the contrast. Just wish I hadn't had the date stamp turned on; in fact, this picture is one of the reasons I hardly ever use that date-stamp function anymore.

 

 

2001

We took a trip to New Orleans once with our next-door neighbours, and while we were there we went on a cruise through the bayous south of the city, where I snapped this picture of a derelict hulk. I think it captures the Romantic aspect of that watery world nicely, and it's a little more arty than the tourist photos, even the good ones, that I usually get when I visit my home town.

2003

 This is the best picture I took in Boston, when my wife and I went there in 2003. I love the coolness of the season captured in this picture, taken in the Boston Commons, and the urbanity referenced by the high-rise apartment building peeking over the trees. We don't get scenes like this in South Texas. We also don't get the deep greens seen in this undoctored picture. 

Our trip to Boston coincided with the 2003 Women's World Cup; I don't remember now whether that was why we went in the first place, but that tournament was re-scheduled after the SARS epidemic forced its relocation from China to the US. Because of that late move, the tournament was held in September and October, instead of the usual July and August schedule. So maybe it was chance that had us in town at the same time as both the WWC and the Yankees-Red Sox playoffs, when we became Red Sox fans. This photo brings all those memories back.

 

 

2004

 This is a picture of Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake, taken during our first annual Condo Week trip in September, 2004. I'm pleased with the haze effect caused, I suppose, by a combination of clouds on the horizon and light reflecting off the oily-looking lake. 

At some point on that trip, I also took a picture from a high spot, looking down on four or five buffalo walking in a line along the shore of the island; but I don't know what's become of the print of that picture. It's not in my on-line album for the trip. Maybe it's not as great-looking a shot as I remember it being, but if I ever find it, and it lives up to its place in my memory, then I'll put it in this blog post. Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with this view of the island from somewhere on the lakeshore.