A Year of Travel Keepsakes

I posted more than a year about earrings as travel keepsakes. I’ve continued that preference over the past year. Here are the keepsakes acquired since June 2012:

From Tennessee in June 2012 (Memphis, Chattanooga, Knoxville)

From New York in October 2012 (Watkins Glen and Corning)

From Arizona in March 2013 (Kartchner Caverns)

From South Carolina in April 2013 (Charleston)

From Virginia in May 2013 (Chincoteague

And Richmond and Norfolk)

From Arizona in June 2013 (Tucson)

And finally - from New Mexico in June 2013 (White Sands and I-10)

These small items are easy to fit into luggage…and great memory joggers for years to come. Here’s to remembering happy times!

Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon - George Washington’s home on the Potomac in Northern Virginia - is one of my favorite places to take visitors. There were a lot of visits when we first moved to the area 30 years ago but they have not been as frequent recently. When I visited a few weeks ago - all the construction that was underway a few years ago had been completed. The new visitor center and museum areas are built to accommodate large crowds; Mount Vernon is a popular place.

On the day we visited, it rained off and on. We carried umbrellas and appreciated that the air was warm enough that being damp was not a problem. The rain was to our advantage: it was probably one of the few times there was not a line to see the house. The rest of the tour is less crowded and includes:

The view of the Potomac from the house

The necessaries (one we saw was a three holer!)

The flowers

The vegetables - including cabbages and artichokes

The old boxwood that overwhelmed the garden in years past are mostly gone, replaced with smaller boxwood that border the beds in the flower garden. The magnolias were in full bloom and I can’t resist a slide show for them.

And finally - the view of Mount Vernon from its carriage gate. What an appealing house it still is.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Jack-in-the-pulpits are one of the spring wildflowers I look for wherever I go in late April and May in Maryland and Virginia. I never saw them as I was growing up in Texas so I was delighted to see them growing in forest mulch when we moved to the east coast. They were a plant I’d only seen in pictures previously and always thought they were odd looking; I thought the same about Indian pipes and horsetails.

The Jack-in-the-pulpits seem to have become more numerous over the course of 30 years that I have found them. Maybe I just am more likely to go to the forests at the right time or I am looking for them with more experience. They often blend in with the other low green vegetation (like May apples and poison ivy!). There are often clumps of them ---- perhaps the patch happens to be the perfect place in the forest for Jack-in-the-pulpits. Other times they are all alone. The stripes come upward from the base and extend over the hood.

But you have to catch them quickly. Their window of glory for the year is only a few weeks each spring! 

Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge

I’ve posted already about the vultures and egrets at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge and the sunset/sunrise at the Assateague Island National Seashore. This post is a collection of other aspects of the place that I photographed on our visit in May.

There were ducklings that suddenly appeared from behind a clump of grass with the momma and proceeded to bathe in the water. Some of the ripples in the picture above are actually more ducklings that have temporarily submerged! Hours later it occurred to me that it would have been an excellent time to try testing out the video function in my camera.

There is a new visitor center at the refuge. The skylights are on top of chimney like structures. They provide light to the inside but not direct sunlight. Good design.

Does everyone that goes to the beach take at least one bird picture like this one to the left?

We didn’t seen any of the famous Chincoteague ponies in the refuge but there were two mares with colts in the corral next to our inn that were available for adoption. These ponies did not seem as scruffy as I remembered from previous visits when we had seen them in the marsh.

The light house was being renovated but we walked around to see it through the trees. I managed to use the zoom to take a close up of the top with the cables attached to support the renovation work.

On the way back to the car from the lighthouse - trying to walk faster than the mosquitoes and midges - I managed to notice and photograph a frog beside the path. It seems like 9:00 AM was the wake up time for the insects and nothing deterred them!

Egrets at Chincoteague

In the early morning, egrets gathered in the shallows at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The gathering was quite close to a place we could park and we were thrilled that they ignored the noise we made getting out of the car. There were two different kinds. The Great White Egrets are the ones that look calm and sedate in the picture above. They are larger and have yellow beaks. Do you see the two of them in the image?

The other birds are snowy egrets. They have black beaks and yellow or red near the eye. The red is the breeding coloration. They were anything but sedate. The squabbles went on and one with lots of fluffed feathers and then some calming seconds to find a snack or strike a pose. Their feathers often look punkish during breeding season.

The Great White Egrets were more focused on food. They generally ignored the Snowy Egret ruckus but sometimes would be forced to move out of the way. My husband caught two sequences (back and front) of the birds landing after a short flight. The pictures show the wings turning up at the end and the way the wings fold as they are landing - with one last flap before finally settling.

Blue Grosbeak at Chincoteague

We pulled into a parking area in Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge beside the road to look down into the water where the egrets had congregated earlier in the morning. There were a few left that we had spotted. Then we notice a splash of color in the grass. I had the advantage - being in the passenger seat with my camera already in my hand. I rolled down the window and started taking pictures. The door helped steady by hold on the camera as I increased the magnification. After the two birds flew a short distance further way, I was able to get out of the car and follow for a few more minutes of picture taking.

As I took pictures, I thought the birds were indigo buntings. There had been pictures in the Refuge’s visitor center that I remembered from the previous day. An hour later when we were in back in the visitor center, I was not so sure. The blue grosbeak looked pretty similar. I could not be sure on the small screen of the camera and I had not looked at the birds with the binoculars; the beak would have been the key indicator if I suspected the issue while the bird was within sight.

When I got home, I used the All About Birds site while looking at the pictures on a larger screen. Confirmed - it was a blue grosbeak pair! And they were a lot prettier than the vultures I posted about previously.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations - May 2013

Back in August 2012, I posted about finding something to celebrate each day. It’s an easy thing for me to do and the habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. Here are some ‘little celebrations’ I’ve noted this month:

Peonies at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. The whole garden was special but the peonies were the highlight. See the post here.

Rhododendron at the Norfolk Botanical Garden. Lots of beautiful plants and glass artwork…but the rhododendron were at their best. See the post here.

A balanced diet day that met 90% nutritional requirements from food. I started recording me food intake on cronometer.com and learned very quickly that there was room for improvement. First I got the protein/carbs/fat percentages aligned to the recommendation (when I started, fat was overwhelming carbs too frequently); then I started to improve the percentage of nutritional targets I achieved with food (from the low 80s to low 90s). It has be more of a learning experience than I anticipated - and a very positive one.

New camera. I am thoroughly enjoying my new camera (a Canon PowerShot SX280 HS). See some blog posts about it here and here.

Planting seedlings grown in egg shells. I planted some seedlings started in egg shells that are doing well in pots on the deck. See the gleanings post that gave me the idea.

Lowest weight of the year; highest stock market day of the year. These may seem like unrelated metrics but they are both items I monitor daily. It is a day to celebrate when they both move in the right direction on the same day.

Horseshoe crabs at Sandy Point State Park. The view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge would have been the highlight for me if the day had not been so misty. Instead I flipped over a horseshoe crab that had stranded itself upside down on the beach and celebrated that is crawled back into the water. I’ll be doing a post about the park in a few days.

Osprey, barn swallows, and immature bald eagle at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. I cannot pick which of the three birds I enjoyed spotting more! I’ll have a blog post in a few days.

Blue grosbeak and egrets at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The surprise of seeing a purple grosbeak in the wild for the first time was quite a high point…but then the myriad egrets and their antics took the stage. Pictures will be posted in a few days.

Finding a surprise iris in my garden. I thought I had moved all the iris bulbs from the back garden that had gotten too shady to the front garden where they would get more sun. It worked - they are booming in profusely in their new flower bed but I found on lone flower in the back flower bed….a missed bulb that managed to bloom even in the shade. I celebrated its survival.

Vultures at Chincoteague

As I walked back to the parking area near the Marsh Trail at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, I noticed a vulture near the top of a dead tree. Pretty soon another bird joined the first. I decided to experiment with the zoom on my new camera. The results are in this post.

Vultures are probably the least beautiful of birds. The head is naked of feathers and their eyes look watery. The mouth is large. They hold themselves in a way that always has a somewhat sinister aspect - hunched, holding their wings in a way that appears to hide something in front of them, spreading their wings to dominate with their size. The two in the tree interacted very little but both spread their wings after a time - I assume to enjoy the warming sunlight on their wings. Many years ago, canoeing on the Guadalupe River in Texas after a night of rain, we saw a tree full of vultures with their wings spread in the sun. I think it was the first time I realized how big the birds are.

I try to convince myself that these birds fill a useful niche in the environment - cleaning up carrion more quickly than insects, mold, and bacteria can do the job. Still - they are not a bird I want around my neighborhood!

Sunset and Sunrise as Assateague Island National Seashore - May 2013

I visited the Assateague Island National Seashore in Virginia this week. There was a brisk sea breeze at both sunrise and sunset - enough to keep the mosquitos away.

The sunset was observed from the Toms Cove Visitor Center. We arrived a bit too early but there things to photograph beforehand - birds getting a snack before darkness and the lighthouse. The lighthouse in undergoing renovation and the cables used are seen in the image. The sunset itself was made more interesting by a lower bank of clouds. After the sun was behind the horizon the swirls in the clouds became more apparent.

The sunrise was observed looking out over the Atlantic from the beach. Again we arrived early but were shortly joined by a few others. It was before 6 AM! One person arrived on a motorcycle and headed off down the beach with his camera. A group of five people walked halfway down to the beach but then stopped and just stood huddled in the morning coolness to watch the sunrise. A man got out a folding chair and walked halfway to the shore and then sat. After photographing the lighthouse in the near darkness, I walked down to the beach. There were no shells to pick up but there was a sandcastle that someone had constructed the day before that incorporated a horseshoe crab into its structure and the waves were crashing to shore; it was good to hear them without the beach repair machinery noise of the previous day.

There was a boat visible in the morning mist. I took a few pictures of birds waking up.

The clouds were thick enough that the sun was hidden until it was well above the horizon and the color did not extend to all the clouds. It was a misty dawn.

Norfork Botanical Garden

I toured the Norfolk Botanical Garden the day after the Lewis Ginter which I posted about yesterday. The weather was still cool and cloudy but I was surprised at the difference being on the shore and a little further south meant. Quite a range of plants highlighted the visit.

There were the normal spring beauties like May Apples (left) and purple flags (on the right surrounding a Great Blue Heron sculpture).

Roses like cooler weather too. They are better now (and then again in the fall) than in the heat of summer. The yellow ones against the rough block wall relieve the harshness of its new construction.

But the rhododendrons stole the show - similarly to the peonies at the Lewis Ginter. I captured the phases of the clumps of flowers unfurling from tight buds. Don’t rhododendrons have the classic shape of a bouquet fit to be carried in a formal procesession?

There was glass sculpture by Craig Mitchell Smith displayed in the garden. My favorite was the blue jelly fish in the conservatory.

And what about a vine with white flowers unfurling - tight spirals expanding to gentle curves.

To end this very full post - enjoy the graceful curves of an aging tulip and spunky columbines. 

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

It was a cold day in early May when I walked around the

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

near Richmond VA. Peonies were the high point - along with pitcher plants growing in profusion near the water’s edge and sweet gum leaves seen from the vantage point of a tree house. The peonies were the flowers that seemed to have their own inner glow on a cold cloudy day.

The tulips were almost past their prime but their colors were still interesting. The double (maybe triple) white one in the picture below was quite a surprise both in colors and the number of petals.

On the Road

I have been on the road quite a lot the past few weeks. There were some long stretches where I was driving and kept myself focused on that activity rather than noticing too much of the scenery. This blog is about the times I was not driving and the road itself drew my attention.

There was an unpaved road of an oak allee. In the 1860s, the trees would not have been as massive but the road would have been like this - a white, sandy track near Charleston, South Carolina. I saw it on a tram tour. It is just a road to nowhere now since the plantation house is gone.

I posted about the Ravenel Bridge a few days ago. This picture shows the approach to the bridge and the graceful arc the bridge makes between the supports. The traffic moved at highway speeds the 10 or so times we crossed the bridge. Is the beauty and uniqueness of the bridge distracting enough to cause accidents? I didn’t see any but was glad I was not driving.

On foot in Charleston, we walked along tourist clogged sidewalks on Church Street. This was a place where being on foot was better than being in a car. The palm trees and window boxes added color to the brick and ironwork of the buildings. And sometimes the street pavement was cobblestones rather than asphalt!

The bridge and tunnel between Norfolk and Hampton, Virginia was another opportunity to photograph the road from a passenger seat. The choppy water under the bridge sometimes formed white foam against the pillars of the bridge. The tile in the tunnel reflected the red tail lights.

And now I am home again - for a little while.

3 Free eBooks - April 2013

The Internet has a growing number of online books…and many of them are free. This is my monthly post highlighting 3 that I have enjoyed most this past month.

Gray, Asa. The Forest Trees of North America. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution. 1891. This is really the plates prepared for a book. The work was done between 1849 and 1859. It is available in PDF form here. The first three images hooked me for the rest of the volume: magnolias and tulip polar. The tulip poplar in our back yard is just getting ready to bloom…and the image captures the look of the tree quite well.

Redoute, Pierre Joseph. Les Roses. Paris, De L’Imprimerie de Firmin Didot. 1824. There are actually three volumes available on the Internet Archive: 1817, 1821, and 1824. All three contain pages and pages of botanical prints of roses. I was prompted to look for these books when I saw a reference to them in May Theilgaard Watts’ Reading the Landscape of Europe.

Sale, Edith Dabney Tunis (editor for James River Garden Club, Richmand). Historic Gardens of Virginia. Richmond, William Byrd Press. 1923. Available from the Internet Archive here. The book includes the birds-eye view of many gardens as well as a few vistas from ground level. It is tempting to see how many of these gardens still exist!

Fiddleheads

The fronds of ferns emerge rolled up - in a tight spiral that unfurls to turn into the greenry that always seems so luxuriant on the forest floor. I saw fiddleheads in biology textbook pictures long before I saw them growing. They were on the list of plant forms to look for along with horsetails and Indian pipes; none of them were easy-to-find in the part of Texas where I grew up because of the dryness and the city landscape. I found horsetails in Oklahoma and the other two in close succession when we moved to Virginia in the early 80s. The fiddleheads have become a continuing favorite for me over the years.

The shape is appealing. Spirals are like infinity into the past or into the future. The translation of that shape into violins and other stringed instruments is a reminder of the continuing importance of plant designs into our own creations; the pleasure in that shape must be deeply etched into the human psyche.

The tight components of the frond as they unwind have a gracefulness about them too. The compactness of the fiddlehead next to the mature frond is extreme. Mother nature is full of design tutorials that are effective and beautiful. Let’s hope that human engineers can approach their challenges with the same finesse.

The slide show below is a collection of fiddleheads from conservatories (Brookside Gardens most frequently) and our local woods.