Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Definitely not the last hoorah! © by adrian



Anyone who has followed this blog knows I've been very slack in adding any new entries in the past few years. Photographic activity still dominates most of my life and really, taking pictures of naked people is a lot more fun for me than writing.

A few months ago I realized that seeing as time was moving on (you know, that place where most obituaries list people five and ten years younger than yourself) it was time to invent an adventure to help keep the old loosening body parts from falling off.

My bride Linda and I had an opportunity to rent a friend's condo near Phoenix, Arizona for a month so we took it. The adventure part grew when I asked Bill, my lifelong friend (and sometimes co-worker), if he would like to drive down with me. I have a large Fuji 617 roll film panoramic camera as well as a few new digital infrared cameras so I felt seeing as we would literally be on the ground we could make the trip a photographic odyssey of sorts. Linda would leave after us and fly down and we would meet up with her a week later. Bill and I have known each other and worked for each other at various time in our fifty year friendship. We've never travelled together but felt any obstacles we might encounter could be easily dealt with. We've shared many experiences and people so we thought it was unlikely we would run out of things to talk about on an eight day drive. I was also curious what my cameras would have to say about places like the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon, among others. Bill decided he would jump in, stay with us for a week and then fly back, so it was agreed.

In my usual style, never being happy with simply large, I decided I might just as well make my part of the journey larger after Linda flies back to Toronto by visiting my last surviving family member, a sister who lives near San Francisco. After I get to California the drive back to Toronto across the country will only add an extra day's travel, so why not?

So, here's the punch line...

Bill has been writing a blog story (complete with pictures and witty prose) of our trip. If you'd like to follow along, click the link below and perhaps start your read at the first entry, which will be at the bottom of the blog posts.


Bill is returning to Toronto next week. Linda will be returning to Toronto after the first week of May and then I'm on to California and the drive back across the country on my own. After Bill's part of the blog about our journey finishes, I hope to continue here whenever I get a chance to fill you in on the remainder of my trip back home. I have a sad prehistoric (pre Colombian period) portable but I will post as often as I can and hope to get a few pictures up as well. The Panoramic film will not be developed until after I return, so I'm afraid you will need to wait for any of those.