Just a quick update since the way things are looking, I probably won’t have time to post the latest pictures and a new blog entry until I’m at my dad’s in DC the middle of next week. Things have been busy busy! I drove seven hundred miles yesterday to make it to Key West in time for my boat trip out to the Dry Tortugas today, but it was so worthwhile. I never did snorkel, but I think (hope) I got some lovely shots of Fort Jefferson - which was very cool, brick arches everywhere, a moat, lighthouse, all in the middle of nowhere on a 10-acre sand island. A special thanks to the Sunny Days “A Squad” for the great trip, I had a blast, and I never puked either. (And I’m highly curious what the outcome of the 4Runner debate is, let me know!) Unfortunately, when I got back to the parking lot where I’d left my truck for the day, I found one of my front tires to be exceedingly flat. It finally happened, 22,000 miles into my trip, my first flat (courtesy of a rather large nail). It took me longer to rearrange the crap in the back of my truck so that I could get underneath the seat to the jack than it did to actually get the tire itself changed. All my practice before I left paid off! And the rain held off until I finished, which was rather nice of it, the parking lot was muddy enough as it was. Too bad it didn’t wait a tad longer until I was back in my car after taking a couple quick pictures of the lighthouse, I got absolutely drenched. Ahh well, probably needed to rinse the tire changing grime off me anyway! Time to quit procrastinating and get back on the road. I’ve got more driving to do tonight, and my day tomorrow has now gotten even busier since I have to get my tire repaired. Let’s hope I don’t get any more flats before then!

After having such a good shoot, and just so much fun in general with the Michigan lighthouses, I feel like I’ve spent the last week or so coming down from some sort of photography high. Not that I’m not still glad I’m roadtripping, but I’ve managed to step on an ant hill, get sick, nearly sweat to death in the Southern humidity, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is downright depressing.

When I left Dayton I headed for the Great Smoky Mountains, where I was reminded of my need to check a map before running in strange places. I Thought I was running a four or five mile loop that would take me back to my car, but that didn’t quite turn out to be the case. If I’d been smart, I would have turned around after I discovered that the first mile and a half of the run were pretty much straight uphill, but I (stupidly) persisted, alternately running/walking since I figured there was bound to be some downhill eventually. And downhill there was…a good three and a half miles of it. That should have been my next clue that all was not quite well…I hadn’t gone far enough up to be coming that far down. My “loop” eventually dropped me into town, a good four miles from where my truck was…and you guessed it, nearly all of that was….straight uphill. At least Chris got some amusement from my predicament (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…I love cell phones that can email). I did eventually make it back to my vehicle, though I hobbled around for days afterwards, my leg muscles absolutely shot from the slightly tougher workout than I had planned.

I woke the next morning to rain and split pea soup fog, not exactly the best weather for photography. I drove through the mountains, unable to see much of anything at all, and eventually decided to head down to Atlanta early, thus buying myself some more time in Natchez, MS. I went through Atlanta for the sole purpose of visiting the historic Oakland Cemetery, by far one of my all-time favorite cemeteries. My mom and I discovered it a couple years ago when we met up in Atlanta for R.E.M.’s final, hometown show on their “In Time” tour (which was absolutely worth flying down for, best show I have ever been to!). Unfortunately, on my way down, I stopped near Clarksville to take pictures of the Pardue Mill (which turned out to be a waste of time), where I inadvertently stepped on a small ant hill. I hate ants. I’m not a big bug fan in general, though I’m not inclined to scream at the sight of a spider or anything like that, but I particularly dislike ants en masse. Especially when they are crawling on my feet and legs. Even after I was quite sure that I had brushed every last one off of me, and checked the insides of my pant legs, socks, shoes, etc., I still swore they were crawling on me. In addition, I’d been bitten four times, which later swelled, and have itched so badly that I have clawed at them to the point of infecting them. To make matters worse, I was bitten by several mosquitoes while I wandered around the Oakland Cemetery, and I have constantly itched since.

I had been looking forwarding to shooting the old Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, but I never did quite manage to find it. I ventured through the forest along the road that was marked “Private! Security Patrolled,” and according to my map I was very much in the right place, but there were locked gates in several places leading down dirt sideroads, and since I was already trespassing, I wasn’t really in a good place to park and go exploring. Too bad. I wound up heading for Vicksburg, where I got caught in a major downpour and wound up sitting in my car reading for awhile, and then started working my way down to Natchez, stopping at the Windsor Ruins along the way. The twenty-three columns are the remains of a plantation house, which ironically survived the Civil War intact, only to accidentally burn down 1890. I ran into some folks who had visited the ruins years ago, when the columns used to be in the middle of an open field, but the forest has started growing up around them. Regardless, they are quite the sight.

I spent the following day shooting the Natchez City Cemetery in hot, humid gloom. I have very much been reminded of why I will never live in the South, no matter how many nice people I meet or old cemeteries there are for me to wander through. And in late September, this isn’t even the hot season! I kept hoping it would just finally actually rain, just so I might cool off a bit, but it never did. On the upside, at least cemeteries photograph well in the gloom. And even better, a cold front moved in later than night and I woke up yesterday to beautiful, cool weather where I didn’t feel like I might drown just from breathing. I’d felt well enough when I woke up, but by the time I’d headed back to the Natchez cemetery to take a couple more pictures, I was lightheaded and dizzy, sweating and clammy, and obviously coming down with something. I decided to drive down to New Orleans like I’d planned, figuring I’d just spend the day parked at a rest area if things got worse. As if feeling lousy wasn’t enough, being sick also meant I wasn’t going to get to see my friend Cowboy John while I was in town. I’m not sure that he’s rode in a rodeo since the one I saw him in when we were in high school, but he’s been “Cowboy” to me ever since. Plus, I was finally going to get to meet his new wife. And even worse, I’ve got boat reservations on Thursday, so this is a chunk of the trip where I have next to no flexibility with my schedule.

By the time I hit New Orleans I wasn’t feeling great, but I hadn’t gotten any worse so I decided to take pictures afterall, and just avoided people in general in case I was contagious. This didn’t turn out to be very difficult when I eventually stumbled across the Ninth Ward. Here it was an absolutely beautiful day and there should have been people out mowing their lawns and kids playing in the streets, and I was essentially the only person in sight for blocks and blocks (I encountered three people, three.) A year later and the devastation from Hurricane Katrina is still mind boggling, frustrating, maddening….depressing. Wrecked cars, a house on a car in one place, doors hanging askew, windows gone, walls gone in some cases, spray paint on the front of each house from the searches. A Taco Bell that was never quite intended to be as well ventilated as it currently is. The remains of a school, social studies books mixed in with the debris. This morning I drove through Biloxi and Gulfport, where I stopped at Fire Station 7. It’s missing two walls, and the guys there told me they anticipate having to work out of the trailer they’ve been given for the next several years. The rebuilding process is slow. It’s still being decided whether or not the Ninth Ward will be rebuilt, but it’s clear from the signs in the windows that the residents themselves would like to return. “I am coming home! I will rebuild! I am New Orleans!”

Home for me is still a few weeks off, and I need to be hitting the road again. I’ve got a lot of driving to do to be in Key West in time for my ferry reservation out to the Dry Tortugas on Thursday. Though I just went and sidetracked myself yet again….I really do meet the nicest people everywhere I go.

The last couple days of my trip have been amazing, and I just seem to be constantly grinning from ear to ear. The weather’s been picture-perfect, as in not a clear blue sky in sight, which has made for some great photography, and regular contact with my super geek always does wonders for my mood. Life is grand.

After leaving Chicago I started working my way up the western coast of Michigan, and the wind was blowing like crazy. I don’t recall ever seeing waves like that on the lake when I lived there, and I certainly don’t remember anyone surfing, but there were a couple dozen surfers out at Grand Haven. They’d walk halfway out on the breakwater and then launch themselves out into the water off the pier, it was pretty interesting to watch. With the weather as wonderfully cloudy as it was, there wasn’t much chance of a pretty sunset, but I was rewarded for my two mile barefoot walk on the beach with the view at Big Sable Point. The sky almost looked as if it was boiling. Heading back to my car afterwards I realized it was much easier to walk on the hard sand right along the water, and rolled up my pants legs…not high enough though, as I was rather quickly soaked above the knees, my second drenching for the day after the occasional stray waves at the Grand Haven breakwater earlier that morning. To top things off, with a mile still to go, it started to rain. Hard. Oh what I’ll put up with for the perfect shot! The next morning I started off at the Manistee pierhead, which was blissfully quiet after the weekend crowds at the beaches the day before. I chatted with a fisherman there, and we discussed the rough water, and he told me about a fishing trip he and his son had recently taken out to an island off of Beaver Island. On the return trip, the day before his daughter’s wedding, they hit particularly rough water in a 16′ boat and thought they were going to die…he knew he was dead regardless, better to drown trying to get home than miss the wedding outright!

I spent the rest of the day in Traverse City, where we lived from when I was in sixth grade through my sophomore year in high school. I did get my driver’s license while we lived there, but I HATED to drive, and I’m quite sure my parents hated driving with me just as much, so I really never did have a good feel for the city…which I’ve now discovered isn’t much of a city and is infinitely smaller than I had thought. Probably a good thing, seeing as my method of navigation left a bit to be desired. I arrived into town, got my oil changed, and went in search of our old house, knowing only the name of the street we lived on. I saw a street sign for “Garfield” and it sounded familiar, but having lived in four different states since then, I couldn’t quite remember if it rang bells from when I lived in Traverse City, or somewhere else. I turned down it anyway, and discovered I was on the right track as things occasionally looked familiar and I did manage to find our old subdivision with little trouble. My sister was in town a year or two ago and had already reported that the field where we used to climb trees has been converted into housing, but I was still a little taken aback when I saw it. Some of the trees had been spared, and I was reminded of the day I lost my temper while playing badminton and beat Amber over the head with my racket. She went to tattle to my mom (our mom, sorry), and I took off running for the field and went to hide in one of the trees. I quickly discovered that I was not alone in the tree though. There was, in fact, a very large raccoon (maybe he’s one of Leroy’s cousins, Collin? haha) hiding in a hollow in the trunk, which promptly scared me into falling out of the tree. Oops. From our old house I headed across town (which really had seemed much further when I was younger) to the old insane asylum which is being converted into housing and shops. They’d finished one main building and were working on a couple others, but many were still nicely abandoned and I had a great time wandering around photographing the exteriors of the building.

From Traverse City I headed towards Michigan’s eastern shore where I shot the last of my Great Lakes lighthouses before starting to work my way south. I’m currently in Cincinnati, headed for New Orleans in a rather roundabout manner. I stopped in Dayton yesterday to check out what used to be the Southern Ohio Lunatic Asylum (later the Dayton State Hospital), which is now a retirement community. Not sure what that says they think of old folks? I drove around the grounds but the place looks more like a large hotel and hasn’t really retained any of the creepiness that’s normally associated with the Kirkbride facilities. Ahhh well. Tuscaloosa’s Bryce Hospital is on the agenda in a couple days, and it is thoroughly abandoned and should be much more to my liking. I must be going, there’s driving to be done…story of my life!

…I have clouds, wind AND waves. My shoes are sopping wet and the back of my pants are soaked from a couple of rogue waves on the breakwater, but I haven’t had this much fun in days!

I was so scatterbrained when I wrote my last update…I’ve spent the last couple days remembering all the various things I meant to mention, which of course I’ve now more or less forgotten, or are just completely irrelevant now. I was a tad distracted since I hadn’t heard from Chris like I thought I should have, and he has a tendency to get shot at pretty frequently anymore (don’t ask, I don’t). Needless to say, I was getting a bit worried. I’ve since heard from him, he’s got a few new stitches but is otherwise fine, and now that I’m no longer panicky, I’m much more focused, and I’ve regained my usual sense of humor. Yay!

Road Construction…For a while there it seemed that Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was going to win the award for most road construction (even more so than Alaska), but Milwaukee (just the city alone) may actually beat it out. If I saw one more “Injure/kill a worker $7500 + 15 years” sign in Michigan, I thought I might scream. And I don’t imagine Milwaukee would be a bad place to drive under normal circumstances, but it is currently a jumbled mass of confused detours. I almost said to hell with photographing the one lighthouse I had planned on shooting there, but then I happened to stumble across it by pure luck. While the Midwest definitely has my vote in the “Most Road Work” category, I must admit that the Canadians are by far the most serious about it, the Yukon Territory in particular. I had meant to mention this eons ago, but when I was driving back down from Alaska I stopped to wait for a pilot car and was rather mindlessly watching the dump trucks along the lake where the road was being repaired, not really paying any attention to how large they seemed given the distance. It wasn’t until I was being lead through the construction that I realized they were the super dump trucks, the kind they use in Kennicott Mine….the ones that are about two stories tall and have a set of stairs that lead up to the driver’s seat. And they’re fast! It was quite the experience to be driving along next to one, well, to be passed by one (four, actually). My 4Runner didn’t even come up to the top of the dump truck’s wheel! But yes, I am Thoroughly sick of road construction and am very much hoping that the lower portion of Michigan, where I’ll be spending the next couple days, won’t be covered with orange cones and barriers. Fingers crossed…

Good Weather…I am also so SICK of good weather! I’ve been looking forward to shooting lighthouses for months and months, and now that I’m here on the Great Lakes to do it, I’ve had the plainest, most Boring blue sky you can get, which equates to highly uninteresting pictures that aren’t the least bit interesting to take either. The only thing worse would be a plain gray sky. Give me some clouds!!!!! The Great Lakes lighthouse (Little Sable) that I’ve been most excited about shooting is on tomorrow’s agenda, I’m desperately hoping something will come along to liven things up a bit…Is it bad luck to cross one’s toes?

Toilets, Showers, Electricity and Skunks….I spent last night in a state park in the northeastern corner of Illinois, right on Lake Michigan. It had real flush toilets, showers, and electric hookups. It was wonderful. I’d spent the night before that at a rest area (where I slept fully clothed since I half expected to be awakened by someone beating on my window and telling me to move along), the night before that at a campground out in the boonies with particularly smelly vault toilets, and the night before that in the boonies (there might be a pattern here) where I never even went in search of the bathroom, since it was late, dark, dark, dark, and really, who needs a toilet when the edge of your campsite will work just fine? It was certainly dark enough to be private (did I mention it was dark?). It was quite nice to be at a campground with all the niceties, and to be able to shower after I went for a run. I ran a couple laps around the road that went around the campground, and I was so in the running zone that it took me a couple seconds to realize that a gentleman in a truck was trying to get my attention. He thought I might want to know that there was a skunk not more than five feet away from the edge of the road where I’d been running. Good to know! When I registered the campground host told me that they have a pair of albino skunks that answer to “Here, Kitty Kitty…!” I’m not entirely sure Why anyone would want to call a skunk in the first place, but people are strange. And often stupid.

Human Contact….I was chatting online with my friend Dave tonight while I was editing pictures and I told him that I’ve been starved for human contact lately. He said “Where are you, Mars???” I probably should have said I’ve been starved for human interaction. With Chris out of the office so much lately I’ve been missing my usual morning conversations, and since my dad has been in town, even my mom is busier than usual and not particularly chatty. Mostly it just seems I’ve spent an awful lot of time driving, which doesn’t really help with the whole meet-people-get-human-contact-fix. Things brightened up greatly in that regard yesterday though (finally!). I chatted with a couple retirees who were fishing from the pier when I stopped in Algoma to shoot sunrise (which I kinda missed, I’m so not a morning person!) and then met the most wonderful woman when I was taking pictures further south. I am terrible with names, they go in one ear and right out the other, though I *think* she said her name was Kathy. Regardless, we met at the Wind Point lighthouse and chit-chatted for a bit, turned out she’s a lighthouse enthusiast from Green Bay who travels around the Great Lakes area to take pictures of the lighthouses. We talked about some of the lighthouses I’d just been to, and where she had been, and then said our goodbyes since she was intending to head home and I had to be getting to Kenosha. An hour later I’m shooting in Kenosha, and there’s a familiar black truck, and lo and behold, Kathy had decided that since she was so close to Kenosha and she’d never seen the lighthouses there, why not? Wound up chatting on the beach for quite some time, she cracked me up with stories about her family (she has three boys who are all a bit older than me). She’s one of eleven children, and before her parents got married they went to a fortune teller, who told one they would have five children, and the other that they would have six. It’s now the family joke that they weren’t supposed to add the two numbers. She’s been one of the people that I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting along my trip, and I even had the pleasure of meeting her twice!

I’m sure there are other things that I had intended to ramble about, but not much is coming to mind at the moment and I need to be tearing myself away from this internet connection and finish my day’s driving. There are new pictures, though I’m not all that excited about a lot of the lighthouse ones, but I was pretty pleased with a couple of the shipwreck shots from Au Sable Point, and I really enjoyed a couple of the cemeteries I hung out at today. And that will have to tide everybody over for a few more days….