I finally have some photos to share with the blog. As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I'm not so good with the digital camera. I usually remember to bring it with me when I go somewhere (after all, it is so small and cute there is very little excuse to leave it behind), but actually taking pictures with it often escapes me. For instance, when David and I were in Florida, we didn't take any photos in Key West or Miami Beach. In part, this was a conscious decision: we both feel somewhat removed when looking at the world from behind a lens, and wanted to be able to experience our vacation as directly as possible. But, for me, at least, part of it is subconscious -- I'm not a very good photographer and getting behind the lens produces some anxiety about that. But we did manage to take a few photos in Florida.
This is me, surveying our retirement property in Cape Coral from the comfort and warmth of David's mom's new CaR-Ve. The weather had just turned from ninety degrees and humid to about forty and windy.
David and I didn't take any photos while we were at Disney, but David's mom managed to get two of us at Epcot. I'm not sure why this one is displaying sideways, and it is too early in the morning for me to try to fix it!
So that was late February. At the beginning of April, I blogged about going to Festifools with some friends from grad school, but didn't say much about what it is. Festifools is a parade of giant puppets that just went up and down, back and forth, about two blocks of Main street for one hour, and was allegedly the final exam for an art class at the university. Some of the puppets were truly imaginative and many had political messages.
I actually did manage to get several photos at Festifools. These were two of my favorite puppets. I especially liked the pig when I thought it was holding a calculator, but a while later, I realized it was actually a cell phone. Of course it was a cell phone -- after all, who uses calculators any more, except for me at work?
The next time the camera saw daylight was when David and I went to Traverse City and Sleeping Bear Dunes two weekends ago.
We made it to the top of the first dune on the Dune Climb just as we realized that it was raining for real and we wouldn't be able to hike the two miles to the lake (and two miles back) without getting very wet and cold (and, hence, rather cranky). So we whipped out the camera to at least document the fact that we had reached the first peak, and then ran back down to the car.
When the rain cleared up later in the day, we did the Pyramid Peak hike, but didn't manage to take a single photo. The next morning, David checked his email from the hotel lobby and found a message from one of his colleagues, a woman who used to live in Traverse City. She said that we couldn't leave the area without doing the Empire Bluffs trail, so we went out there the next morning. At that point, we were feeling a bit guilty about not having taken enough photos, so we took way too many on that hike.
Our travels through the Sleeping Bear Dunes were guided not only by brochures we picked up from the park service, but also by a book of 50 Michigan hikes that my mom gave us several years ago, and which we are slowly working our way through. As I read the descriptions of the hikes in the book, David remembered a trail that was known for being a place one might spot hang gliders, and kept asking which one that was. Since two of the hike descriptions mentioned hang gliding, I chose the one that actually said you might "see" hang gliders. It turned out David wanted the one with the hang gliding launch area, which we found the next day. We had spent so much time discussing (and, yes, arguing about) the semantics of "seeing" hang gliders as opposed to reaching the hang gliding launch pad, so I just had to document it.
There are plenty more photos on my Flickr photostream if you haven't had your fill yet!



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