Furnace Town

One of our October photo shoots with the Coastal Camera Club was to Furnace Town, a restored area depicting the site devoted to the manufacture of iron ore in the late 1800s.  As usual, we carried a list of scavenger hunt photos to shoot.  Among these pictures are items from my list.  Can you identify them?  

His and Her outhouse, Wash tub, Woven basket, Blacksmith, Oil lamp, Organ, Bird house, Flower pots, Broom

    

Large furnace

red doors

inside the church

 

Love this wreath!

 

working with this spider web

punch of red

inside the building with the looms

Fun day!

Traveling on......to Colorado

Our final big jaunt this year was to Colorado for a reunion with dear friends in Monument, then onto Pagosa Springs for adventures in southern Colorado.

The ladies stayed with Donna while Mike and the guys stayed elsewhere and spent the four days hiking and sight seeing around Colorado Springs.

Jim loves the red rocks and took many pictures of them.

Our first trip with the Divas was to Pikes Peak, traveling on the cog railroad.  And yes, I did whiff the oxygen when we got to the top.

We traveled on this train up, up, up to 15,000'

We could have walked out onto the clouds!  Also, there was a gift shop on top as well as hot donuts!

Another trip was to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument where petrified tree stumps such as this one have been preserved and protected.

Our last evening was spent eating out and planning the photo book we will dedicate to Barb.

On we traveled to Durango

where we boarded a bus to Silverton and trained back to Durango. The train pulled right into the middle of Silverton!

Here we go on a thrilling three hour ride in an open car, all the better to photograph the steep cliffs we passed through.

In Mesa Verde National Park, Jim hiked to Balcony House, one of the cliff dwellings built centuries ago.

Pagosa Springs

Chimney Rock

Pagosa Peak as seen on a four hour tour through the San Juan Forest which surrounds Pagosa Springs.

On this Jeep tour we drove through a ghost town called Pagosa Junction.  Pagosa means "healing".

We also drove on reservation land.

And saw elk!  Note the alpha male.

This was our view from our back porch where each morning we watched hot air balloon launches.

And on our last day we watched a festival of many balloons being launched.

Big shot

Last weekend Fred, Valerie, Jim and I attended Jim's alma mater's Big Shot.  He is an RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) alumnus and so is Val, so together we four went to the campus, attended a lovely alumni picnic reception, then participated in the Big Shot which was actually on the campus and featured lighting some of the newest of buildings.  (See RIT.edu.bigshot for history of this event.)
Quite simply, the Big Shot is the evening lighting of a subject with camera flash and flashlights and photographing the subject using only this light.  Logically, lighting an entire building (actually two) and quad, required many hands holding these sources of light.....3000 people!  A photographic wonder!  By the time we returned home to Fred and Val's the finished product was up on the website!
Jim and I have attended before when the Smithsonian's Museum of American Indian History was photographed. The Alamo, Intrepid, Rochester's High Falls and Mt. Hope Cemetery are just a few challenges tackled in this way.

See the final image at:
                                                 http://bigshot.cias.rit.edu/save-the-date-for-big-shot-no-30/

A drone video is at the following link:
                               https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtIRtB9eJB4&feature=youtu.be

Golisano Institute for Sustainability Building taken the evening before.

On the roof

The Quadrangle in front of the building

From the roof again

Inside (reception being set up)

Steps to the second, third and  fourth levels

Looking down from the fourth level

ALS bucket challenge

Odd to me is that though there are only thousands of people in the entire US affected by ALS, two men live here in our small southern Delaware area.  Therefore, the bucket challenge to bring awareness to this disease, is all around us.  Many challenged and challenging others.  Huge amounts of money raised and ice tossed over the heads of many.  Jim performed it well!

He was challenged by a church friend, and dedicated his icy splash to our property manager here in Westwood just diagnosed this spring.

Palouse food

Oh, my!!!  Small town food is DELISH out west.  Every small deli or restaurant or breakfast spot or diner presented us with food that was very pleasing to the palate, served with a smile.  Mostly, it was just comforting to sit awhile out of the HEAT of the day and talk among ourselves, always about where we had been, what we had seen and photographed, and how we were going to work with our photos.  I listened and absorbed as much as I could.  After all, I was the novice and these were the people I could learn a lot from!

Cherries are Washington's signature fruits.  The chef of this diner where we dined on our last meal together made this excellent cherry pie enfolded in the flakiest crust ever!

Lunch here on the main street of Colfax:  good coffee with  cream cheese, turkey, and cranberry 

on a croissant.  That's Jim's peach smoothie in the picture.

Greasy spoon diner also called TOP NOTCH DINER breakfast of eggs with everything and rye toast.  The chef here kept a large tub of butter next to the grill.  We also ate at another bistro on the main stretch that featured fresh scones and big pieces of yummy quiche.

Also on the main street of Colfax was a Mexican restaurant with good margaritas and a great taco salad.

More great meals were enjoyed at BREAKFAST CLUB in Moscow, Idaho and FIRESIDE GRILL in Pullman, WA.

Summertime

Ahhhhh!  Summer!  Roads in and out of Bethany get busy, super market lines long, and our beach crowded, BUT the weather has been perfect with few very hot days and many just right.  And it has even rained this summer, so we have had to water our vegetable and flower gardens infrequently, and still their output has been great.  This year our neighbors actually took our invitation to help themselves seriously and many have shared in our bounty....even a bunny who got stuck in the garden trying to scurry away from our neighbors who were picking.  Our garden and the local farmers' markets have kept us happy with fresh fruit and veggies.  I have frozen tomatoes and zucchini (one of our garden zucchinis weighed 5#) and put up peach jam with the best peaches ever from Bennett Orchards......all the rest has been eaten!
Besides loving the steady flow of grands and kids through our house and Jenni and Larry's and Will's, we had a great time traveling out west to an area called The Palouse in southeastern Washington State on a photo taking workshop with our leader and seven other people.  Words cannot express the beauty of the place, so our pictures will have to suffice......and believe me, it is hard to post just a few!