Month: September 2019

Here, finally, is part II of my August road trip. Production on this installment was halted by a surprise trip back to Illinois, a trip which was unfortunately heavy on time spent waiting at the DMV and unfortunately light on picture-taking opportunities. But I’m sure that absolutely no one reading this (including myself) cares about my gripping adventures with local bureaucracy–so I’ll get right back to the previous month’s trip.

When I went back to pick through my photos of downtown San Francisco, I discovered there weren’t enough to warrant a full post on their own. So to pad it out, I decided to include my photos of Minneapolis here, instead of sticking to a more strictly chronological order and putting them with part III. A reader must, then, use their imagination to assume several days of highway between the first 11 and last 4 photos in the gallery.

Check back in another week or two, when (optimistically) I’ll have up my last post in this Road Trip series. Then, maybe, I can focus on the more timely task of documenting some fall scenes around the city. And in the meantime, enjoy a last glimpse of August in the gallery below!

San Francisco #1

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This was about to be one big post–that is, until I realized I had thousands of photos to pick through and edit and if I wanted to do it in one go, it might not be up till Christmas. And given that it’s a post about a multi-week summer road trip, I suspect that Christmas might not be the best time for it.

So I think I’ll do this in three parts, the first part being a 3-day Amtrak trip from DC to San Francisco. The other installments will feature some fun on the 101, a gorgeous drive over Montana freeways, and a visit to the (questionably) famous 9th-and-Hennepin intersection, among other adventures.

During my train ride, I got to pass through some of the most beautiful scenery in the country, and to make conversation with an array of bizarre, remarkable people. I arrived disoriented and sleep-deprived (given that I hadn’t sprung for a sleeper and consequently got practically no sleep), but the whole thing was so, so worth it. One upside of being fully conscious at 5:00 am was that I got to take full advantage of the morning golden hour, a time that I rarely get to experience awake.

Honestly, most of the photos I took out of the train window didn’t turn out that hot. At first, I had my doubts whether any of them would even be usable–many were blurry or had too many reflections from the windows. But then I looked at them again, and decided that even the photos that might not be technically great still had a kind of interest about them. They grew on me. And after some editing and thinning of the photo crop, I realized that I did like this batch of photos–in fact, I liked them a whole lot. And I hope you like them too.

(A quick note: the rainbow sheen on some of the skies is the result of a weird reaction between my polarizing filter and whatever UV coating they put on the train windows. It was a surprise side-effect at first, but I ultimately decided I liked it.)

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Check back for part II in a week or so!

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