Thursday, July 29, 2010

Photowalk 2010

Last weekend was the 3rd annual Worldwide Photowalk. This was actually my first one. It was a blast, I wish I could’ve caught the previous two!

We started near the Pepsi Center and wandered toward the Auraria campus. For such an urban area it has a surprising amount of plant life in a series of small gardens and plantings. It’s really quite nice.

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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Memphis Zombie Blues

The second day of our trip we managed to escape Kansas. After a brief trip through Oklahoma and a turn onto I-40, our directions simply said "Pass through Arkansas." That's it, for an entire state. And that pretty much sums it up. Sure, we saw some pretty landscape, made a few jokes about stopping off at the Bill Clinton Presidential Library to see if it was anything like what Frank Caliendo said.

Our destination for the day was Memphis. We were only there for an evening and a morning, but it was a heck of a good time. We headed down to the party district, Beale Street and snagged a nice patio table outside BB Kings. After some tasty Memphis barbecue, the place was overrun with the undead!

Through a bit of luck and a lot of good research & planning on Wendy’s part, we were in the perfect spot to catch the Memphis Zombie Massacre. They put on a great show – it was even bigger than Denver’s Zombie Crawl.

Suffice to say we took a photo or two. Thousand. Anyway, I don’t want to go overboard here, but click through to the gallery and there are a ton of zombie photos.

The police seemed unconcerned about the zombie hordes. Unconcerned enough to strike a pose full of attitude, anyway.

Afterwards we wandered Beale Street. It’s a mini-Bourbon Street, minus the porn shops and about 95% of the stench. Most importantly, they do have walk up bars with bigass frozen drinks. Through another luck/research/planning confluence it was the tail end of the Memphis in May music festival. The street was packed with musicians, party people, and street performers.

There was a stage down every alley, or at least every alley we walked down. This particular one had a good blues band (with a keyboard player from Wisconsin!) Part way through the singer you see here came up from the audience and sang a couple songs. She was actually really good! The girl’s got some soul!

At some point we stumbled back to the hotel to prepare for day three of vacation. Yes, I know, at this rate it’ll take me until roughly Halloween to make it through this vacation. I’m trying here, OK? In the mean time, check out some more photos.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Rolling (Through) Hills

IT’s time (well, was time) for another road trip! Our longest yet, down to New Orleans – 1600 road miles from Denver.

There’s some really interesting terrain between Denver and New Orleans. There’s just not a whole lot of it. We spent the first day just getting to the other side of Kansas – it’s a damn big state!

Although it’s maybe not the single most interesting bit of the US, I actually enjoyed Kansas. It’s actually pretty in a wide-open sort of way, and not quite the Cartesian plain everyone says it is. The only real downside was that the sun turned the car into a greenhouse. After a while we were cruising along shirtless. But I’ll spare you those photos.

But we did get to see a little bit of roadside Americana in Kansas. We just happened to pass by this big (12 foot?) Buffalo Bill statue so we pulled off on a whim. They’re actually very nicely executed sculptures, and they look right at home on the Great Plains.

We also stopped off at the infamous Dodge City. Dodge City is not the archetypal Wild West town it once was, but they do have the Boot Hill Graveyard Museum and Tourist Trap. It was mildly interesting, but also unsettling. Not due to the (now empty) graves, but because there were three times as many staff as customers. Every time we went into one of their little shops there were a bunch of bored employees in Old West period dress staring at us. It’s gets unnerving after a while.

After escaping the vortex of tourism we continued across southern Kansas to Wichita. Along the way we got some pretty decent barbecue in a dusty no-name restaurant, and some miserably bad Mexican at a crappy “family” chain. Not the most exciting day of vacation ever, but not too bad. And they only got better from there.

 

A few more random photos:

Friday, July 02, 2010

City Park Fountain

I ran over to City Park the other night for a quick sunset shoot. The clouds didn’t deliver, but just after sundown the fountain really lights up.

 

In other news, I was planning to get back to posting more regularly this week. Then my laptop decided to become really unstable – it’s crashing randomly. So I haven’t been able to get any real work done. Hopefully I’ll get a new machine soon and be able to get back to posting. Fingers crossed!