Category Archives: scenic

Road Trip

informational, national parks, nature, personal, photograph, recreation, scenic, travel, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Loving Fall Travel

We’ve found that early fall is a good time for a vacation. Most of the summer road repair is completed, the places that we’ll visit are less crowded, gasoline prices have come down and lodging is less expensive. So it’s off we go.

We decided to skip the camping this year and instead enjoy the comfortable hotel beds at the stops along our planned itinerary. This trip is probably a 5000 mile journey, but I like driving and my wife Kris doesn’t mind filling in once in a while. She has plenty of books to read during the long hours in the car.

From our home in Grand Rapids we start with a long initial drive to Salt Lake City to visit our grandson in college. Next across the sparsely populated central Nevada to Mammoth Lakes and Yosemite to view its sweet valley and giant sequoias. It’s a short hop to Reno for a few days stay with family. Then it’s through the mountainous forest of Idaho and Montana to do some hiking in gorgeous Glacier. We’ll head south to northern Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley and then traverse the torturous Beartooth Hwy before the snow falls. Finally traveling east again we’ll hit Badlands and then head home again through South Dakota.

The car is filled with snacks and drinks for the long hours on the road. And as always I have my photo equipment ready to travel.

We’re going to place a few stickers on our car from our sister company StickItToYourCar.com

We’ll have some new photos from our travels here when we return.

Sea Creatures

nature, personal, photograph, presentation, recreation, scenic, travel, , , , ,

Starring in the Lantern Festival

This past May we visited the local John Ball Park and Zoo to see the yearly Lantern Festival.

We arrived a short time before evening so that we could enjoy the colorful lights that adorned the huge and creative lanterns.

Here are some of the Sea Creatures themed lanterns.

 

Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

About This Photo – Summer 1970

informational, personal, photograph, presentation, scenic, travel, , , , ,

Memorable Photos

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed photography since I was a youngster. So my picture taking has spanned more than five decades.

The photos that I take belong to one of two “camps” – snapshots and memorable.

This article is the another in a series I’ve named “About this photo” to draw attention to a few of those memorable photos that may be hiding in a shoebox or on your hard drive.

Some individuals have photographic memories. I instead have memories about certain photographs.

Most of these special photographs were taken long, long ago. They are indelible and remain riveted in my mind. And so, in this “About this photo” series, I’d like to key in on one of these unforgettable photographs to bring me back to the time and circumstances under which it was taken.

Taken late summer 1970, this is a photo of my girlfriend along Lake Michigan. We spent many weekends at this beach that summer.Usually the beach was very crowded, but on this cloudy and windy day, we had the run of the sand and shore to ourselves.

The red lighthouse was a familiar site to anyone who knows this area and remains a key attraction to the beach today. It’s a lucky coincidence that my girlfriend’s jacket was about the same shade of red as the lighthouse.

The reason that this photo is etched in my mind is that I’ve been married to this lovely lady for 50 years now.

Now let’s skip forward some 40+ years.This photo was taken a few summers ago. Here we have two young girls having fun at the same location on Lake Michigan.

You can see the same red lighthouse along the water albeit at a slightly different angle.

These are two of our young grandchildren. As we were walking along the beach I was reminded of the 1970 photograph when we approached the red lighthouse.

I asked the two girls to pose on the bench in the foreground. This photo captures the familiar feelings of warmth and affection that has somehow remained with me for more than 50 years..

Along the way, I’ve taken a huge number of snapshots. However, the number of memorable photos that I’ve taken is far smaller. Yet it’s the memorable ones that have a magical ability to steer emotions, feelings and pleasure into our minds, even years later. Simply amazing.

Written by

Arnie Lee