Recently in Travel Category

I finally got around to processing and uploading the pictures from when Heather and I went to the Los Angeles area in August for her friend Zeenat's wedding. We went to the beach, I hiked in the mountains, and we saw lots of wildlife.

See the whole set here.

Last weekend we trekked over the mountain passes (on the two of the very few days in the past month that they've been reasonably clear!) and headed to central Washington to attend the Othello Sandhill Crane Festival.

Every year in late March, tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes stop in the fields around Othello to feast on waste corn and grasses before continuing their trip from central California up to northern Canada and Alaska, where they nest and breed.

Although that area of the Columbia basin only averages eight inches of rain per year, it drizzled for most of the trip (resulting in lousy light for photography), but we still saw several fields filled with cranes and geese, and also some other new species, including Burrowing Owls. On the way home we made a few side-trips, as well.

Check out the entire set here.

With talons that huge and sharp, there's no way I'm telling this Great Horned Owl that he's not a migratory bird.

A few photos from a stop last September at this fascinating sanctuary that is located just south of Vancouver, BC. Check out the set here. Four new species for the birdspotting list, and a dramatically improved shot of the owl!

Last weekend, we went on a loop of the North Cascades to see some foliage and wildlife, and to escape a seemingly-growing pile of black fur (also apparently it was a birthday or something like that.) We were successful on all accounts, and here's the evidence. My new copy of Adobe Lightroom 2 has some fun features and development presets that let me really bring out the *POP* in these photos. See the whole set here.

My new theme idea for the moment is to use song titles as my entry titles.  We'll see how long it takes until I either get bored with it or forget.  Tonight's title comes courtesy of Matthew Good and the album Hospital Music.

In what might have been the most exhausting day of travel I've ever been on which still managed to successfully reach its destination, I got back to Seattle tonight, getting in my door at about 8 pm PST after leaving my parents house in Buffalo at 5:15 am EST (and here it is now at 11 PST and I'm still awake, although only nominally so, and only until I finish typing this sentence and click 'submit'.)

Went to Niagara Falls and took lots of photos (to be uploaded later), went to another Sabres game (they lost), and now went to bed since we're leaving the house tomorrow at 5:30 am.

Another Christmas has come and gone (well, in ten minutes it will have gone, at least from this coast.) Having missed the past two family Christmases I can't necessarily judge this one as being abruptly different, but people have slowly drifted off either due to death or work, and slowly people have grown older and the excitement surrounding the event has abated. Gone (at least for now) are the days where the kids clamored to open their gifts at the crack of dawn and a separate table was set in the kitchen to contain the mess. Now everyone is either exhausted after a few hours, or has additional family obligations at other houses and has to skip off quickly, leaving a dwindling crowd to pick at the remains of the meal and socialize.

On the plus side, most gifts these days are the cash/gift card variety, which also means gone are the days of waiting in mile-long lines at the returns counter.

One more full day for me in Buffalo; one more full day of recollections and memories; one more full day of the ghosts of familiar sights and sounds; one more full day of old haunts and old patterns; one more full day of flashbacks to my 21 year-old self.

One more day of living out of a suitcase in a guest bedroom in a house I once knew. I'm ready to go home.