Sonoran Desert Camping and Sunset

We recently went camping at Pichaco State Park, about 40 miles north of Tucson. The lower altitude are part of the unique Sonoran Desert. It is a lush desert, with saguaro, cholla, barrel and pad cactus, palo verde and mesquite trees, creosote bush, and ocatillo. The campsite had all of these and some great lava rock outcrops.

A trip highlight was seeing the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. It is an amazing place with the whole range of Natural Histort - a botanical garden, a zoo and geology exhibits. It also has opened an Art Institute with classes and exhibitions. One of the two exhibits open now is just stunning - the Fiesta Sonora runs till Jan 10 2010 and I highly recommend it.



Alas, the underwater beaver pictures did not come out but I liked the Bighorn Sheep ones.

And the sunset was subtle, but lovely.

Amazing Travel Accomplishment

I gotta brag:

I just finished paying the credit card bills from the trip and was rather amazed that the vacation sub-account is far from being empty. When we planned the trip I established a Not-To-Exceed Budget and a fairly detailed Target Budget that was about $500 less.

The bills are in now and for the first time, we have come in under the Target Budget by about $200. We were not doing the trip on the cheap in any real sense, but I guess I finally have got the hang of estimating.

Milverton Idyll

The village of Milverton, in Somerset, on the border of Devon, feels like a home place to us. Pauline, intrepid soul, knew of us through a number of common Sierra pack trip friends, though we had never met. She invited us to stay sight unseen back in 1992, and has never been rid of us since.

Her peaceful house and wonderful garden are where we have the rest and relaxation parts of our vacations to Europe. Pauline has no TV, only classical music and weather on the radio, and it is so very sweet to just be still. The entertainment is quiet conversation, a walk to the village

shop, or helping prepare the spinach bed. She takes good care of us with an absolute minimum of fuss. It is the kind of place where the milk still comes in bottles, the apples come from the backyard, and one might know the name of the hen that laid the morning egg.

We reminisce about the Sierras and

how good it was to go riding over the mountains before the lawyers got to it, and discuss the places we have seen and want to see in England. Pauline translates "biro", "Ford Prefect", "council house", "concessions", "hoover", "O-levels" and much more. We help her with rock music crossword clues. We watch birds.

The village has a lovely old church, one shop, one pub, 4 streets and maybe a dozen connecting lanes and paths. There are many gardens of note, many ancient red stone walls, and a lot of artists and craft people. It looks very much like St. Mary Mead looks

like in my mind.

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!

Whew! The pictures from the trip have all been through the basic post-processing routine and the ones we feel others might like to see are posted on the Picasa web site: http://picasaweb.google.com/cathy.hoaglund

They are in the public folders. This is another attempt to balance the preferences of many people. We feel compelled to tell people about the interesting things we saw and to show off some photos we are really proud of capturing. A lot of our friends do really enjoy looking at photos, as we do, but others have a strictly limited attention span and we cause their eyes to glaze over rapidly. This way the non-photo-enthralled can skip it or buzz through a dozen or so and it will be OK.

But getting them up here is certainly been a lot of work. I think I am going to collect an informal sample for a future post on what it takes to be a hobbyist photographer. If anybody reading this would like to contribute, please leave a comment or send me an email with your answers:

1 .When you are on vacation or otherwise having a major picture-taking day, how many pictures do you shoot? (under 25, dozens, a hundred or more, several hundreds??)

2. How long does it take to prepare your pictures afterwards? How many hours per day of shooting?

3. About what fraction of pictures do you throw out? (Ours is about 40% I think - if you compare the show set to the originals, but we keep a bunch for reference that we don't show or print.)

4. What else do you do with your pictures besides purging the duds? For example I rename them so the Rich & Cathy shots are mostly interleaved, and do some minor cropping, straightening or contrast adjustment where needed. The we add captions and title slides. Then upload to Picasa, and last, make prints of the ones that we feel are worth it. Oh yeah, and I burn CDs.

What other things do you do to organize your pictures?

The Trinity Capital Hotel, Dublin

The Trinity Capital Hotel was bundled with the airfare, and was a pleasant surprise. It is right around the corner from Trinity College's College Green entrance, a very busy intersection and handy for the busses. The decor fascinated me - so many very large things of very diverse style but all working very well. The restaurant - Cafe Cairo - also had very good food. But it was very noisy - it has a fire station next door and is close to the train and tram lines.

I think that the following picture should take you to a slide show in Picasa.

Trinity Capital

Arthur's Day and Night, Galway

We were in Galway for what turned out to be a major Irish holiday - Arthur's Day. In 1759 Arthur Guiness signed a 9000 year lease - yes, nine-thousand years!) for his new brewery. In honor of the 250th anniversary the Irish threw an enormous party, with pints either free or 2.50 Euros. The streets were packed and there was music everywhere. Made me kinda sorry I can't stand the stuff!

There was a huge toast to Arthur at 17:59 exactly - but we had lost track of time and missed it.

Sparklers were used a lot, though you can't see much here

This was the best of the many, many groups playing Irish traditional music in the early evening, though it was clear that the party would really just get started about 9:00 - too late for the likes of us!

Dublin Details

Dublin is not a pretty city, like San Francisco or San Diego. It is not as overwheming as London or New York, and it lacks the dour, handsome dignity of Edinburgh. But what it does have is an abundance of interesting architectural details. In this respect, it reminds me a bit of Boston. Here are just a few such details - although they were photographed on a gray day, I think the interesting bits come through. The "Dublin Shots" link should take you to the Picasa site if you want to see more. {Warning: As of Tuesday 10/7 I am only up to day 3 out of 15 so this is far from complete at this point.}



Door and weather vane from Dublin Castle

Chimney Pots, Dublin