A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
We’ve had some absolutely beautiful days over the last few weeks, and it’s been tempting to just abandon everything at the house and head out with a camera. I was able to do that a couple of times. These were places I’d visited many, many times, but I got a few good photos on separate trips to Pearson Falls and Poinsett Bridge to share.
It had been awhile since I’d visited the Pickens Flea Market. I had visited once since returning from the west coast, and at that time I didn’t play with the musicians circle. I figured Halloween would be as good a day as any to pay another visit, and this time I was loaded with guitar, banjo, melodica, and tin whistles.
When I was in middle school (or Junior High, as they called it back then), occasionally one of my classmates would show up with some cool contraband object that they would show off at recess. It might be a toy, a knife, or some thing they weren’t supposed to have at school. When asked where they got it, the answer was invariably the Anderson Jockey Lot.
When you’ve lived in an area as long as I have you can’t help but find yourself exploring places that you’ve been previously. Expect the term “Revisited” to start popping up more frequently in blog post titles. This was the case for a recent photo trek with fellow explorer Mark Elbrecht as we wandered over lower Laurens County. We both wanted to see what was left, if anything, of the old ghost town of Renno.
I’d only been away a year and I grew up here, but I was still suffering from culture shock. I’d gotten used to certain things in the Pacific Northwest and found some things (mostly behaviors) either odd or downright irritating. I decided what I needed was a full cultural immersion, so on Wednesday morning I headed to the Pickens Flea Market.
Read More “Cultural Re-Acclimation at Pickens Flea Market” »
Less than two weeks!! That’s all the time we have remaining on the island. In reality, it’s less than that as four of those days will be spent in Chicago at a family wedding. Where did the time go? With the travel, packing, and squeezing in last minute music gigs, I have officially reached the freak-out stage of this adventure. We did manage t get in one last ferry trip to Friday Harbor, as well as seeing some elk along the Skagit River.
For several weeks Laura had been admiring this view from our front yard…
This is a view of Anacortes with the Olympic Mountain Range back behind. She’s been wanting to take a trip out to the Olympic Peninsula and head up into the mountains. Some friends of ours took that trip recently posted photos of fields of lavender. We decided that the time had come, so we took a spur-of the moment trip up into the Olympics.
For years I’ve observed the railroad tracks that hug the base of Chuckanut Mountain. The line crosses the Samish Flats from Mount Vernon then curves along the coast right at the waterline. From the tracks you can see across Samish Bay toward the San Juan Islands. Even more intriguing to me was the fact that Amtrak runs along these rails. I knew this was something we had to do while we were out here, and we got that chance this past Tuesday.
Read More “Amtrak Cascades Trek – Part 1, Mount Vernon to Vancouver” »
I miss a good, old-fashioned Southern flea market, the kind where you can find anything from fishing lures to knives to rusty tools to outdated medicines to questionable Confederate adoration. There’s just nothing like that up here. The western term is “swap meet”, but I haven’t even been able to find one of those. At least in this corner of the state swap meets are infrequent and are nothing like those in the South. I was eager to find some alternative.