A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
It has been tradition for Alan Russell and me to take a photo excursion on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This time we decided to make the trek up to North Carolina and visit the Henry River Mill Village. This choice ticked lots of boxes – it’s a ghost town, and it served as the shooting location for “District 12” in the movie The Hunger Games. It turned out to be a day that went beyond expectations.
It has been our tradition to do a hike with our Lowcountry Unfiltered group on the first Second Saturday of the year. This year Second Saturday is a bit later in January as New Year’s was on a Sunday. I guess that’s as late in the month as it can get. This year we decided to return to the site of our first Swamp Stomp, Congaree National Park.
So far my paddling trips to Lake Russell have been fraught with intrigue. Last time I dubbed the trip the “Paddle through Mordor” because of all of the smoke from forest fires in the Blue Ridge Mountains. This time Bennie Waddell and I would tempt fate by going kayaking on Friday the 13th.
Sometimes an idea comes together perfectly. Such was the case this past weekend, with the first snowfall of 2017. I had a brainstorm for an image, and the conditions were just right to make it happen.
It’s time once again for the RandomConnections Calendar. This is the tenth year that I’ve been creating calendars for friends and family using photos I’ve taken from the previous year (and beyond.) As usual, I like to recap the photos included on the calendar and give a bit of the background behind each one.
2016 was a really, really crappy year for a lot of reasons. However, one area where it wasn’t so crappy was for kayaking. I visited lots of venues and got in over 200 miles of paddling. Not too shabby, considering there was lots to conspire to keep me off the water this year.
The holidays are always a whirlwind, and this year was no different. As has been our custom for the last several years, we spent most of the time in Florida. Quite a bit has happened over the past couple of weeks, so I’ll just do a quick summary.
One of my favorite services is the Festival of Lessons and Carols. To me it doesn’t seem like Christmas until I have attended at least one service. I have an academic fascination with carols, and I love traditional settings, as well as seeing the way composers and arrangers have brought new life to these ancient texts. This weekend I was privileged to participate in two services in two different settings. This time, though there were some fascinating twists to the traditional service.
Yesterday I completed one more trip around old Sol. Yep, it was my birthday. My gift this year was an Amazon Echo Dot, one of the new home A. I. units. I’d actually been playing with the system for a couple of weeks. I thought I’d take some time to share my thoughts on this, and its competitor (sort of), Siri.
Just because it’s December doesn’t mean that we stop paddling. Heck, for this particular trip we even went swimming, but that’s getting ahead of things a bit. Fellow explorer, and now fellow paddler Mark Elbrecht proposed a trip out to Andersonville Island to see if we could spot the ruins that everyone says are there. Bennie Waddell had just gotten a new kayak, and I lacked only 6 miles to push me over the 200 mark for the year. Of course, agreed to come along. Turned out to be a great trip with unexpected finds and unexpected excitement. But, I guess the word “unexpected” is redundant. Regardless…