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.
