Flying by the Seat of Our Plans

After dinner, we grabbed the gear and headed down to the creek.   The Milky Way wasn't quite yet over the creek and the lodge patios were lit, so we tried to incorporate the lodge itself.  This picture took a lot of time to edit.  It is a composite of two photos: one about 20 seconds long to capture the Milky Way and one about 4 seconds long (and at lowest sensitivity) to capture the lodge without it just appearing like a supernova.  Then I essentially painted the two pictures together in photoshop.   By the time we sorted the lodge shot out, the Milky Way had risen over the creek.  There are several wing-dams in the creek that channelize the river, creating some nice ripples. We had thought we'd have to wait for the moon to light the rocks and trees, but the lodge did a nice job of casting soft light on the scene.  This photo is actually a stack of several (5-10) photographs, each 20 seconds long.  Stacking allows the compute...

Laura is sweet and came up with another idea for an overnight getaway.  The focus was to go see Johnson Shut-ins in the Missouri Ozarks.  When we were trying to find a place to stay, I opened the Dark Sky Map and saw that there's a large area west of there.  Laura quickly found that Echo Bluffs State Park, only two-years old, has a nice lodge overlooking a creek, and she booked it.  I picked out a few stops on the way there and our trip was already overbooked.  We stopped where we could along the way and just enjoyed the ride. First, we stopped and took a short hike to Blue Spring.  To put the name in perspective, I did not edit this picture at all.  The color you see is what we saw in person! A few more pictures from Blue Spring: The huge volume of water coming out of the spring flows over rocks and aquatic plants, setting up some other nice photos. Next, we headed to Round Spring on the way to Ech...

Rental cars are often an integral part of travel, and the ol' insurance waiver salesmanship is one that rental car agencies seem to stress pretty hard.  We (almost) never get the rental car insurance because we believe that our credit card will cover any damages.  But will they?  What follows is my recent experience with a rental car insurance claim and some notes on what I learned.   Spoiler alert: that wasn't so bad, after all! If you've been following this blog, you know we took the Nissan Armageddon on some crazy back roads.  Well, while we were driving down one of the National Forest roads (not even one of the wild ones), a limb from a fallen tree scraped the side of the car.  The car was so filthy that we didn't even notice it until we washed the car just before returning it.  I thought it would buff out and crossed my fingers that I wouldn't hear anything about it. The most obvious scratch in the picture was on the front door...

I (Laura) was particularly excited about entering Idaho.  I have always wanted to visit Idaho, ever since I had made a good college friend, Lindsay Jones, who was from there.  The geology is interesting and the scenery spectacular.  We had already made a half-mile jaunt into Idaho on this trip, but it was so small that road signs did not even announce that we had changed states.  Today, however, would be the real deal. On the gravel road down from Webb Mountain to the main road, we saw many more deer and two more red foxes.   For perspective, here is John pointing to the Webb Mountain lookout from the last post.  You can also see the Koocanusa bridge (across the Kootenai, which spans the Canada-USA border), where we took some of the night photos from earlier. We drove along the Kootenai River for a while, stopping to stretch our legs at Libby Falls and the Swinging Bridge.  The hike is maybe 0.5-1 mile from the lot on the main highway ...

I had asked everyone to bring one nice outfit for portraits.  We finally had some downtime and good weather, so I took pictures of Laura and Johnny. I have enjoyed combining long-exposures with portraits.  I'm not sure if the models love holding still so long.  There are multiple takes of this shot where Laura's hair is all over the place in the wind. It was already mid-afternoon and I wasn't sure that we'd have time to drive to and hike to Mt. Henry Lakes.  The forest service roads took a lot longer to drive than I had anticipated when looking at maps back home, so we elected to go to Boulder Lakes Trail which was closer than other afternoon sights.  Also, the trail was supposed to be a good bit shorter than other options, which would be good for Uncle John.   We arrived to find a gate blocking vehicle traffic farther out from Boulder Lakes trailhead than we had thought, making the hike just as long as Mt. Henry.  I'm ...