Sunrise, a walk, sunset

Hello,

It’s easy to get up before sunrise when there is a big hunk of rock in the way.

I could see the sun warming the nearby town long before it reached our campground. I hiked a trail around the base of the rock (I should look up its name, so rude of me), which made a loop above the campground. I encountered a rabbit hopping through the desert garden. After some careful pursuit I finally caught the wascally fellow (on silicon). The trail gained enough elevation that I could watch as the sunlight crept into our camp. I had my French press travel mug in my left hand, my camera (or at this moment phone) in my right hand, and my gloves on when I could. When I descended and emerged into the sunlight the gloves and down jacket came off pretty quickly. Desert extremes.

I’ve taken a lot of photos on our Nikon. They may or may not be good, better than these taken on the phone, or spectacular. I hope for option three but it’s hard to know till you get them up on a good screen. When that time comes I may post them separately from this timeline blog. Organization is hard work. When I was thinking about this it occurred to me that not long ago (on my scale) I wouldn’t know if anything showed up on film till days or weeks after taking a photo. My first SLR did not have a light meter built in. It came with a palm sized device. You read the level, dialled in the estimated shutter and aperture needed, and hoped for the best. If it was important, bracket!

We packed up and moved on. Desert, vineyards and pecan (that’s ‘peh-kahn’) orchards by the mile-acre. I need to come up with a unit of measure that reflects the acreage depth off the road and miles travelled that some of these operations cover. It is impressive. Wait, maybe I just did that. Mile-acre. Just let me convert that to metric...

Our day ended at another state park, in time to enjoy the sunshine, 19C temp, and, what else, another satisfying sunset. This photo was taken from our campsite:

This was day seven. It seems like we just set out. We will start slowing down now that we are in our destination region. The van needs a rest.

stay calm,
j