Weekend Trip to England

Saturday, I woke up rearing to go to a photography expo taking place at the same time/location of a craft fair. We were going to make a whole family day out of it, but when I arrived, the whole thing was fairly blasé. The theme of the photog lectures was photographing nature, so we decided to instead go out into nature and take some pictures there.

We drove through the countryside on tiny little one lane roads that reminded me greatly of England. Then we parked and climbed England Mountain at the Wildcat Mountain Natural Area, maintained by The Nature Conservancy.
Make certain that you vote in the poll of which of these two butterfly shots you prefer.
We encountered a fungus humongus.


And we saw some lovely tiny lichen.
Next we saw a stick insect. He was bookin' it across the trail.


At the 1.5 mile mark, halfway in, we came upon this little spring house.

Near the spring house was the Smith House, on old homestead, abandoned well before anyone thought of modern conveniences like plumbing, electricity, or rat poisoning. Livia went in first and then came out screaming that there were rats in the ceiling. Of course, I had to go in and photograph the place, and it gave me an extreme case of the heeby-jeebies. If you yourself don't take a lot of photos, you may not realize this, but photography is extremely hazardous. When you're looking through the viewfinder of the camera (or even at the LCD screen on a digicam), you lose all sense of everything going on around you. You could easily lose your balance from tripping over huge gaping holes or a gigantic rat could sneak right up on you. I went in aware of this vulnerability, so I had the girls guard me. I didn't manage to see any rats myself.

We had a marvelous time and appreciated our own house when we arrived home.