Saturday, May 1, 2010

Travel Journal - Trip to CA and Camera review

My sweet hubby and I have just returned from a week-long trip to visit friends and flowers in California. Mostly, only a few of the the pictures of the flowers came out well enough to post, but we did get a few that please us. (See our public album at picasaweb.google.com/cathy.hoaglund for bigger and better images.)
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In February my Canon Powershot SD 690IS decided it would no longer focus, for reasons it did not share with us. I have been very happy with the quality of the Canon images I have gotten from some 4 generations of pocket size digital cameras, but was not pleased by this one deciding it was retiring early. I found the Olympus specs and write-ups for similar models to be satisfactory, and then Costco had a sale on a kit of the ruggedized Stylus Tough model. Since the two prior cameras met their ends by being dropped into lemonade and by meeting rock with a very hard crunch, this sounded good - shockproof for a 5' drop and water proof to 15'. And it fits very well in a pocket.
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Alas, it has not worked out happily. The Olympus folks seem to have attempted more than they could deliver in the handy little box. It has many fancy modes - but none of them work all that well. It seems to be optimized for faces, not landscapes, (whereas I seem to be optimized for landscapes) and the color is just not quite right. I cannot make the macro mode work. It keeps turning on the "operate by tapping" mode. (Bizarre!), and it has no good place to hold it. The battery is good for less than 100 pictures even newly charged. And their software is not as good as Canon's. Sigh ... So I am saving my pennies some more and will probably return to Canon.
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But anyway - on the first day we stopped off at a river gorge at AZ Highway 89, north of Paulden and the Drake turnoff, but not as far as Ash Fork. We found it very appealing despite a lot of graffitti and few flowers. Does anyone know the name of the spot? It was evidently the site of an Easter Egg hunt with not very efficient hunters.

We had much better flower luck stopping several times in the Mojave National Preserve, on the Kelbaker road which goes north from I-40 to I-15, passing through Kelso and ending up in the thriving metropolis of Baker.
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We saw many great flowers, including the
Mojave Yucca (above) and
Prickly Pear:
Prickly Poppy,
and a new species for us, the handsome Desert Lily.






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As always, we had not arrived when Kelso Depot was open, so we could only admire the historic building in passing.




We made one more stop , at the point where the road and a sandy wash both penetrate a black rhyolite lava flow. It was sunset by then, but we were still able to get some of my favorite shots from the trip - Globe Mallow, Barrel Cacti, Brittle Bush, Asters and many other flowers.












Baker is the site of the Mad Greek Restaurant, a personal favorite for three decades now. I am sure the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was inspired by a visit there!
Warning! Do not try to finish a Greek Combo dinner by yourself no matter how hungry you are or how good it smells. You would think we would remember this after all these years, but we must have carried about 4 pounds of leftovers with us when we left.
And so ended our first day. The next two and a half days were work, so we will pass over them. Tune in next week for the next thrilling episode - Poppies etc!

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