My cousin Elizabeth recently re-did her webpage and coincidentally I got the urge to work on mine Saturday. I sat down last night and came up with the banner. Initially there was white space where the butterflies were but I couldn’t think of an appropriate photo to stick in there and then I found the little wingdings and the butterflies just ‘became’. Voila! The biggest pain was going through every page I have to fix it all. The photography link above does not work currently because it will eventually link to our photo website. We have a potential name, to be announced later, so once we finally decide on the name we’ll let you know! I’m hoping we’ll have a big head start on a site by the end of October.

My granddad could also use some prayers. After breaking his hip a few weeks ago he has been in a rehabilitative center but he’s gone back and forth between doing well and not doing well. Now he has pneumonia and has been swelling a lot so he is now back in the hospital. I would hope that he can get over all of this and back to his senior living apartment.

Today we spent all day running around changing our cars over to Texas registrations and the last thing we had to tackle was getting our licenses. We waited in line nearly an hour to find out we needed either our passports or birth certificates. I had gone to their website to find out what we needed so I’d brought our social security cards thinking I was on the right track but we were turned away after standing in line to stand in line. I don’t understand why this isn’t listed on the door when you go in? It would save so much time for everyone! I then went back to their website and yes, tucked away in link after link does it state that. Again, can’t they be better and list it on ONE page? I just don’t get it.

I need a job, too.

Chris’ mom got us a ride on a hot air balloon on Friday morning for the Plano Balloon Fest. I was leery of going because of some previous accidents in which I was thrown out of some boats and some really bumpy airplane rides, but the ride was pretty smooth. We didn’t go far or high due to zero wind and I wasn’t that appreciative of the guide bumping the treeline on purpose, but it was fun to see. I definitely wouldn’t do it again but if you don’t have issues with heights I’d would suggest going!

I was on my Flickr account the other day when I stumbled across this photo tucked into our gardening section. Ah, it makes me miss all of my plants. That is a variegated vanilla orchid and one of our favorite plants. We had several types of vanilla and because of Chris’ super awesome watering system on the porch they became very, very long vines. We cut them into sections to sell when we sold all of our plants. A few plants are still at Chris’ dad’s house but otherwise everything we had is gone. I think I miss our ylang-ylang tree the most, mostly because I grew that thing from seed and it managed to make it 10′ tall. Sometimes though, I am thankful we don’t have to tend to plants and add it to another thing to worry about right now. We have both talked about having animals when we get a yard, he wants to keep bees and I thought about chickens, but I’m wondering about how well they will do on extended trips away. Kinda hard to get the neighbor to watch your pet chickens!

In case you haven’t noticed, I am on a super blogging kick. I have so much to share and write, mostly photos and I just want to write, write, write! With all of this blogging kick I now want to redesign my entire site. *crap*. I don’t think I have much planned this week other than looking for jobs, changing our car title and licenses over and running out to east Texas to visit Michelle & John Paul, so perhaps I can get something done. Does anyone have a good program they know of for building a photo gallery? I started doing all of the photo stuff using HTML tables but it is a p.i.t.a. and I have no interest in keeping up with it. Ugh. I want something simple and slightly flashy.

Right now Chris has made his own Flickr account to showcase all of his fancy photos: go here to check it out!

Ah, well. I guess that’s it, or what I could pull out of my brain this morning. We went to the Grapevine Wine Fest last night and it was much too crowded. And expensive. I feel like an old fart (sorry to old farts everywhere…!). Apparently when one turns 30 everything becomes ridiculously expensive, such as at the movie theater yesterday afternoon when I wanted to buy a Vitamin Water. At the gas station they run maybe $1.50 or so. They wanted $4.50 at the theater. Seriously? No thanks. At the wine fest turkey legs were $8. Really? At least the wine wasn’t exorbitant and was around $4 or $5 a glass which seems about normal for a house wine at a restaurant.

So, (wow, I am pulling more things out of my head!) I finally went to see Eat, Pray, Love. I read the book a few years ago and loved it and I was not disappointed by the movie. I do think they sped up the Bali part to move through it a bit, though. Javier Bardem made me forget how much of a psycho he was in No Country For Old Men. Mom thought he was Denny from Grey’s Anatomy; similarly hot, but not the same.

Alas, maybe I am done rambling now. What are you doing on your Sunday?

Mom told me about Roots Coffeehouse a few days ago so I went the other day while doing some errands. It is located in the North Richland Hills town center on Grapevine Highway across the northeast campus of Tarrant County College. They even have a blog Blog! If you read this Roots, you should update your blog and let us know what is going on!

There were a lot of outside seating for those who wish to go out.

For being an organic and fair trade oriented place I thought the prices were pretty good. I bought a cafe au lait with soy milk. I was also asked if I was a student, so there must be a discount for students. Drat, maybe I should go back to school?

Lots of cozy places to sit and the tables were full of people studying, laptops open with their coffee mugs.

I was excited to see that there was art for sale on the wall. I am curious on the process for getting art up, though.

I want these doors!

The back part of the store has a quieter feel and you could easily pretend you are tucked away in NYC.

If you are local to NRH or the Mid Cities I’d give the shop a try. Loved the atmosphere and the coffee, not too strong.

Relevant posts:
Spring in Erwin

We’d heard from our friend Thin Mint had said that the climb out of Hot Springs was one of her favorites and it wasn’t a let down. As you leave Hot Springs you walk along the river front for awhile until you climb up onto the ridge and head on out of town.

We saw two snakes on our way out of town, this one and a water snake down near the river.

On our way out of town we ran into On the Loose who was slackpacking her way back into Hot Springs. Slackpacking is where one gets dropped off at a certain distance from town and walks back to town with a light pack. It is usually done to avoid a climb, but sometimes it’s just to get something in, a sort of ‘nearo’ to spend more time in town. We’d met her in the Smokies. She and Red Hat both had the same red shirt I had, a Smartwool shirt that we’d all bought on Steep and Cheap! I always wished we’d gotten a photo of all of us wearing the same shirt together.

That night we made it to the shelter and it was packed, only 10 miles out and it seemed everyone wanted to hit that site. This is where we first met Nobody, a tattooed bar owner from New Orleans. He was also the athletic challenge type and was planning on trying to get to Erwin in a short amount of time, just to see if he could do it. At that point in time I always wished I could do that sort of thing! We also ran into Red Beard/Grateful and Jasper again.

We took this sign at Allen Gap and at this gap we saw Jasper and Grateful on the other side of the road. Jasper was excited about seeing new hikers and ran across the road to greet us. We walked across and sat down for a little break when Jasper saw another hiker on the other side, only this time there were cars coming. Jasper ran into the road and stopped. We’re all yelling at the dog to move out of the way and he is so confused and for some reason he narrowly misses getting hit. Then he just as he makes it to the other side he decides to come back over and of course, get in front of another car. It was a sweaty few seconds but the dog made it back across alive and was promptly put on his leash!

We had one pretty rough climb that day, 1,000 feet in a smidge over a mile up to Camp Creek Bald. Somehow it didn’t really turn into a bald; perhaps it was at one point.

We had some beautiful views from Blackstack Cliffs and Big Firescale Knob. We poked our head in a few little side trails to see about some views.

Jerry Cabin shelter where we camped for the night.

The guy in this photo is named Hobbit and he was hiking a 25th anniversary hike of his first thru-hike on the trail; hiking back to Maine where he lived. We never saw him again after that day. I think we kept in front of him for awhile until we took the time off in Virginia.

The next morning we climbed up Big Butt Mountain and of course all during the climb I had the song on my head. If you don’t know what song I’m talking about you must’ve missed the 90′s.

The trail was really smooth along the way down to Devil Fork Gap. Along the way we passed the Shelton Graves a Civil War massacre site. A lot of the trail in the southern section, and well I guess along the whole thing, has portions that were taken by locals for hundreds of years, including the Native Americans who settled it. I couldn’t help but think of these soldiers hiking over such long miles with the pitiful shoes they used to wear and drinking untreated water.

At Devil Fork Gap we got super awesome trail magic by a couple who’d hiked the AT the year before. The husband made homemade pizza’s on his propane powered oven! It was so awesome! The next thing we had on our agenda was to go up Frozen Knob and head to Hog Back Ridge Shelter.

We eventually ended up stealthing at a site about a mile or so past Sams Gap where a spring and small tent site was located. The sunrays were beautiful coming through the trees and we were joined by at least three other hikers.

The following day we had some beautiful balds to go over and it was such a gorgeous hike. Our first was to tackle Big Bald.

Bald Mountain Shelter.

It was one of those perfect spring days, where things were beginning to get warmer and the wildflowers are blooming everywhere. After a brief stop at the No Business Knob Shelter (no privy, no water…bummer) we kept on going down to Temple Hill Gap where we stayed for the night, putting us closer to getting into Erwin the following day. The hike into Erwin was only four miles and of course the book makes it look like it will be mostly down hill but there were some PUD’s tucked away in there. But, of course we rolled into Uncle Johnny’s hostel, right off the trail by about four steps, and into Erwin quite early in the morning.

Shelters we stayed at:
-Spring Mtn Shelter
-Jerry Cabin Shelter
-”springs” at mm 316
-Temple Hill Gap

Up next…Erwin to Damascus and one of my favorite sections.

Our first stop on our road trip was out to Caprock Canyon State Park. We took U.S. 287 from Fort Worth out past Mineral Wells Wichita Falls, a town I’d never been too and I was surprised that it was a decent sized city, and on into the rugged, western setting of Texas. We thought we’d prepared and brought everything but once on the road we realized we’d forgotten our dinners. We’d decided to buy those heat and serve frozen meals, like Berrtolli or Stouffers, since they are easy to cook and pretty tasty so we pulled over into a dinky little town with a tiny grocery store to buy more. Well, apparently small towns jack up prices because they were wanting over $9 for those meals when in a normal town you could get them for $5 or $6. We passed and continued on until we found a bigger city.

Sometime in the afternoon we finally made it to Caprock Canyon SP where we quickly realized it was going to be a very quiet spot. The lady at the front desk told us to be careful with our water consumption since the trail we wanted to go on had no water and you could quickly become dehydrated, but she also warned us of potential flash floods since Tropical Storm Hermine was going to be narrowly touching the park that night.

We grabbed our gear and set off for a hike down the Canyon Loop/Upper Canyon trail. Somewhere along the way I decided to turn around and let Chris keep going since I felt a bit rushed to do a 7 mile trip in only a few hours when I wanted to stop and ‘smell the cactus’ so to speak. We agreed to meet at the other end where he’d come out at so I turned around and went back to some spots that I’d skipped by in our haste to keep going. I ended up going to a few other spots and tinkering in a creek bed for awhile. It was fun to step in the clay mud and look for tiny little nuances and perfect scenes.

Here are the photos I took that I decided to be for the blog. I’m still working on the ones that I think are ‘best’ and will show those at a later date.

Oh, here is a post on another blog with more detailed information about the park: Blog. If you are looking for a quiet park to do some exploration, this is the park to go to!

I’m actually amazed at how many sunflowers dot the roadsides and fields around Texas.

We drove down the main road at night to see what kind of animals we might run into when we saw this western diamondback snake. It was friendly enough to let us take some shots and I got out my 300mm so I could take a few. Our first western diamondback!

The next morning we drove outside of the park and saw some scissortail flycatchers and spotted these, well, what I believe to be, mule deer. Either that or they are a very dark morph of a white tailed deer.

Of course I didn’t have the right lens on or enough time when we spotted some bobwhite running around on the side of the road, so I only go this shot…

And this one of a group flying away.

I wish I could have spent more time at this park but we moved on the next day. I’d love to go back and do more of the trails and even do some backpacking in the park. It is truly a unique place!

Relevant posts:
Max Patch Bald

When we left the Smokies we ended up at the Standing Bear Farm Hostel. It wasn’t our intended destination but once we heard about pizza and soda’s we were easily adaptable. We arrived around 5pm and the place was packed. The people we thought we wouldn’t see again were staying there for nearo’s and zero’s and it was an all out party. The hostel itself was kinda neat, rustic and such, but I was peeved that the bunkhouses were full and we had to tent. To boot we had to pay the same price for tenting as if we were in the bunkhouse. Probably one of the most rotten deals on the trail. The food itself was serve yourself and on an honor system.

Some of those people in the photos, I don’t know what happened to them. Did they finish or get off?

We left out of the hostel late in the morning, nearly lunch time, and it was blazing hot. No leaves on the trees yet so the sun was shining brilliantly and warming things up. The climb out of the gap and up Snowbird Mtn was brutal because of the heat.

We originally planned on staying a campsite near a forest road but decided to push on to Max Patch bald for the night even though we’d started so late in the day. We stopped a few times to rest and get water.

At this shelter we met up with Willie and Pirate, two, I guess you could call them trail rats? Similar to mall rats? Just two older fellas who bounce up and down the trail for varying lengths of time; they’d already thru-hiked before, maybe even more than once. We ran into them again once we got to Damascus; they were helping out at the hostel there.

Max Patch was an awesome place. Prior to going up the hill we saw water trail magic, a jug of water left by a trail angel, but it was already empty. Once we got on top we saw there were several others who decided to camp out on top as well.

The wind blew pretty hard throughout the night and in the morning we were the only ones with a tent left up. Others had taken theirs down in favor of cowboy camping.

The next morning the hiking was pretty easy. We cruised downhill for a good while and had two climbs for the day.

Wildflowers were becoming more abundant as spring was showing her face.

Just before this gap we ran into our first ‘southbounder’, but it was really a southbounder from ’09 who was completing his hike since he had gotten snowed out at Roan Mtn in the Fall. I remember thinking that I was slightly jealous that he was almost done with his hike and we were just beginning.

That night we decided to stealth outside of Hot Springs, NC so that we could get into town super quick for breakfast. We had received a giftcard from a friend to a bed and breakfast and we were looking forward to having a hot tub and a fluffy bed to lay our head on.

Since the trail goes straight through town, Hot Springs has put in very cool sidewalk emblems to mark the trail.

Mmm, food! I miss being able to eat anything I want and not feel guilty.

Hot Springs is a very tiny town; you can walk to one end and back to the other in just a few minutes. We poked our head in the small shops, went to the outfitter, did our laundry before heading to the b&b.

I know we took several baths in the whirpool hot tub! oh, it was delightful to soak our muscles and relax. Originally I said that we should do that every 500 miles, but we ended up saving our money and stayed at hostels or cheap motels.

More good food at the Ironhorse Station restaurant. It was a good thing we stayed in town that day because it decided to rain all day. We left Hot Springs after lunch the following day and had a beautiful day of hiking.

Next time: Hot Springs to Erwin, followed by Erwin to Damascus. Then we’ll break up Virginia into at least three sections!

Zoe loves cameras and I think someone in the family was planning on getting her a children’s digital camera for Christmas.

The next set was very fun to shoot because it all happened in a short period of time. The final shot is one of her bawling but it came out blurry because she moved too fast for the camera settings I had on, so I didn’t bother to upload it. Oh, it will definitely be given to her parents so they can show it at her 16th birthday party! hehe!

Hey Dad, can I borrow your camera?

Sure kid, lemme show you how to use it!

YAY! I’m so happy I got the camera! It’s alllllll mine!

Nooooo, I don’t want to! (her favorite phrase, or at least it was last week.)

I’m might turn into an Auntie blogger! HAH!

What I thought was a milkweed bug, but I’m not sure so someone id it for me, on a yellow flower in Palo Duro Canyon State Park. Check out the pollen it’s kicking up at the top right!

Our whirlwind road trip across Texas is now over. Somewhere in the middle to late part of the trip I got a little exhausted thinking in photos. Thinking about what to shoot, angles, techniques and trying to go above and beyond. It was just a bit too much, I think. When we got to the beach on Mustang Island I just wanted to sit and be, to relax and love the water and salty air.

So, as for the photographs I will be separating them into blog worthy and into those I am saving to post on our, hopefully soon to be, photography website. I think a few saved ones may end up here, too, but I want to save them. Right now I am also trying to come up with a work flow plan. I want to keep track of where my photos are, also write down what edits I do with them in Photoshop just in case I lose the copy and need to go back to the original.

I’m also trying to find my niche. I want to do landscapes but I also feel that sometimes Chris and I shoot very similar things, especially in similar places. At some points I preferred to go down a different trail than him so that we had different things. I was very excited about one shot I took at Palo Duro Canyon and then I flipped through some of his stuff and saw he had something very similar. Drat. I suppose we’ll just see who has the better one? Chris is also into panoramas and stitching photos and I’m not, but I did try one that I want to put together. I also took a lot of reverse lens macros and am thinking of doing a diptych series of some of them. Does anyone know of any macro photographers that I should be studying from? I kinda Googled a bit the other night but I didn’t see any one particular website that jumped out at me, it was mostly websites that talked about macro or about the top macro photos.

A few list type things:
-I am planning on doing more Nature in the City posts.
-In the same vein I am going to start a Local Coffee series. I had some local coffee in Port Aransas at a place called Coastal Waves and it was really, really good. The place had photos for sale on the wall, oversized comfortable chairs…a nice place to go.
-A free Messy Canvas ebook is now out! I downloaded it but haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
-Grace Potter and the Nocturnals has a new album out and I really want it. Badly. I need a job, too, so I can buy it. Or maybe someone to buy a photo! heh!
-I updated my “About” page. I plan on updating my header and sidebars soon, too. That takes more time, though.

Now to tackle my to-do list.

A story by Zoe:

One day I was at a park with Mommy, Daddy, Aunt T and Uncle Twis. We had all sorts of fun and I was minding my business drinking out of my sippy cup and apparently I left my belly hanging out.

Then my Mommy told me to stop looking like a redneck and put my shirt down! She ruins all the fun! My belly needed a tan, doesn’t she know that?