Note: this is a very long post, and the image gallery is all the way at its bottom. If you don’t want to read the post and only want the pictures, just keep scrolling.
Hello again. It really has been a long time now, hasn’t it? What, five months? Six? Though I don’t know if it matters, as to my knowledge no one reads this habitually.
There’ve been some major changes in Rose-land (Rose-ville?) over these months, and I like to tell myself that’s why I haven’t been keeping up with this site–or with my photography business. For one, I moved again, across the country this time. I live in central Illinois now–and it looks like this is where I’m going to be for a while.
It’s taken some time to adjust to the Midwest, and to reconcile how the identity of my photography business will have to change now that I’m here. So much of what I’ve done up till now relies on a sense of place, and that place is DC. I still have family in DC so I’ll be able to visit regularly, but I’m gonna have to broaden my horizons, explore my new hometown a little. Try to figure out how I can turn this–excuse the melodrama–“suburban purgatory” into art. I’m sure I’ll be able to…
I’ll have come up with a new tagline for this site too, I suppose. Can’t exactly stay “photos from DC and beyond,” can I? And “photos from Champaign Illinois and beyond” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Another big change–this one more on the optimistic side: I got myself enrolled in a couple classes at the local community college, including an auto mechanics course. I’m hoping I can continue in this vein and eventually, earn my ASE certification. I love playing at the whole “artist” thing, but it would mean a lot to also have a mechanic’s income.
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Finally, to the photos–the real purpose of this website. Late last summer, I embarked on a sprawling trip across New Mexico’s back highways with my wonderful father, Rolf. Both my parents are Albuquerque natives, and although I am certainly no native, I did get to know New Mexico pretty intimately during yearly childhood (and later adulthood) visits. Albuquerque is among my favorite cities in the world, and New Mexico might be my favorite state in the USA. This visit was especially fabulous, and the icing on the cake is all the gorgeous photos I got out of it.
We alighted amongst scenery new and familiar as we criss-crossed the state, from hiking up Sandia peak in Albuquerque, to soaking up the hot springs in Santa Fe, to camping in Chaco Canyon.
We drove through miles of lonely reservation land, and slept nights in the dusty motorcourts of Taos and Farmington.
We visited (during the off-season) the little sanctuary in Chimayo that plays yearly host to a famous Catholic pilgrimage.
We visited (during fire season–and during the fires) the spot in the Valles Caldera where we’d scattered my grandmother’s ashes years before.
We took windy mountain roads past highway graveyards, and right up to mountain cliffs so high you can see the lightening below you.
We braved a hike under the midday sun in the surreal, sweltering Bisti Badlands desert, and we drank watery coffee out of hand-made mugs in the Cerrillos souvenir trading post.
And then we boarded a 737, and we flew across the Rocky Mountains, and we landed right back in Washington, DC.
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