Did you hear that sound? That was the sound of the deer population letting out a collective sigh of relief now that I am home and off the road. I think I’m starting to get a bit of a reputation as a serial killer. Two deer in three days. Thankfully, the one last night died instantly, though I won’t soon be forgetting the image of it somersaulting by my door after bouncing off the front bumper. There was a definite sense of deja vu when I got out of the car to view the damage. Both sides of the front of my truck match again! And it wasn’t like I was only going to be able to replace half the bumper anyway…It really would be almost comical if I didn’t feel so badly about it. But yes, I am home now, as of about 2:30 last night. And more importantly, I’m clean!!! Oh, the wonders of running water! I’m home a day early so that I can take pictures of kiddies in costumes at the Birth & Family Place’s annual Halloween party today, but I’m hoping to get all of the pictures from the last week and a half (Long Island, Weston State Hospital, Big Basin Preserve, Hovenweep, Valley of the Gods, etc.) posted some time tomorrow and write up an actual journal entry. The last couple weeks definitely cannot be called boring!

…and I am still upset. I get calmed down and then I picture the poor deer trying to get up from the ditch and I get upset all over again. I have a hard enough time with roadkill as it is. I’ve noticed every dead animal for the last 30,000+ miles, cats and dogs in particular. I always think, that could be one of my furballs. Even the trucks transporting live chickens in those little tiny cages bother me. I see those and wonder how come I’m not vegetarian. Blah. In Moab now. Four hours from home, if I wanted. I’d really been looking forward to shooting Southern Utah once I decided I was skipping Buffalo, but now…I dunno. Home is tempting. Just not really sure if I can find my groove again after this morning. I’m very lucky though, things could have been much worse. There could have been oncoming traffic and I could have had nowhere to swerve to, I could have hit the deer head on and had it come through the windshield, instead of just hitting its hindquarters. I almost missed it. I do owe a big thank you to the guys at Big O Tires in Cortez. They tried unsuccessfully to find an auto body shop that was open on a Saturday morning and then sent one of their mechanics out to see what he could about getting my bumper pulled back. He even wired my turn signal light back into place for me. Guess I should probably get on my way to Arches, see if I can find the photo zone. The sun is pretty much straight overhead right now which sucks for most photography, but it’s the best time to shoot Park Avenue without the heavy shadows….

I was so close to making it home accident free, and then I hit a deer this morning. Actually still a couple yards from it, I happened to hit it in front of an RV park with wireless. Waiting for the trooper to write up the accident report. I swerved and tried to stop but still hit it. Mostly cosmetic damage to my truck, though my bumper is shoved back and rubbing on my tire some. Wouldn’t be nearly as upsetting if the deer had died outright, but it kept trying to get up out of the ditch, and State Patrol finally came and put it out of its misery. I thought running over a duck a few years ago was bad, but this is so much worse. It kept trying to get up….

Hello from Joplin, Missouri! Just a quick update…I thought I might have time to post some new pictures, but so far all I’ve succeeded in doing is making backup discs and I think I still have about 300 miles to drive tonight. I was supposed to be checking out old mills in Arkansas and working my way west through Oklahoma, but the lousy weather/light has forced me to change my plans. Why drive all those extra out of route miles to not even get any worthwhile pictures? Now I’m just going to drive straight across Kansas, need to be at the Big Basin Preserve bright and early tomorrow morning. Though I must say that West Virginia was worth every mile I had to drive, I was successful in my attempt to shoot the interior of an insane asylum! That was definitely an experience, and not one where I ever found myself feeling the least bit comfortable. Talk about being on pins and needles! Thankfully I had a good shoot anyway. That’s been the highlight of the last couple days. A couple insane asylums, the last of the lighthouses, and now I’m on my way home in a rather roundabout way. Not sure if I’ll get any pictures posted before next week or not, we shall see….I’ll fill in the details then, gotta run….well, drive….

As luck would have it, my “groove” actually continued for another day, despite the gloom. I was highly pleased with some of the shots that I got in northeastern Massachusetts. I could have hung out all day on the breakwater at Eastern Point. As it was, I shot about 150 pictures there before I did manage to tear myself away. I love the water. I Love the water. I still have two more days left here on the coast and I’m already missing the ocean. The Great Salt Lake just doesn’t cut it. *Sigh* From Gloucester I headed down towards Fort Pickering on Winter Island, where I met the nicest man who works at the gate at the state park there. He’s retired Coast Guard and was up on all sorts of trivia about the various boats that come through the area. I chatted with him for a while on my way into the park, and then again on my way out after I spent a good hour shooting the lighthouse there (the sky was perfect!). I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but I really do meet the nicest people everywhere I go. This was especially important today, ’cause I could have been in some deep doo-doo, but more on that in a bit (or a while, knowing the way I ramble!).

I was running a bit behind schedule so I crossed Boston off the itinerary for that day and headed straight to the South Burying Ground in Billerica. I did my research for my trip so long ago now that in several cases, I’ve showed up to a place on my list and not had the slightest clue what it was that might have interested me about it in the first place. I had even scribbled the word “Abbott” in my notes, but couldn’t remember what that might mean either! The South Burying Ground looked like pretty much all the cemeteries I’ve been to lately and I almost got back into the car and left when I noticed the dates on a couple of the graves. 1686. 1693. Having lived primarily on the West Coast, I just never see graves this old and I was quite fascinated. One marker that was flat on the ground inspired me to pull out my Lensbaby and I got a couple cool shots with it. Oh, and I did eventually stumble across a cluster of graves for the Abbott’s, mystery solved!

From Billerica I headed down to New Bedford to meet up with Ayan and his wife, Sheetal. Ayan is my ex’s cousin. We met once in person four years or so ago, and have been emailing off and on since. You’d never know that we’ve spent next to no time together in person, it was almost as if we’d just hung out last weekend. I was excited to finally meet his wife and immediately liked her. I used their spare bedroom as a home base for four nights and hung out with them after I finished shooting three of those days and I had a blast. Even if I didn’t have the best of shoots while I was in the Boston area, I still had a great time there. Thanks again, Ayan & Sheetal!!! Though I must say, I’ve been in a pretty good mood lately anyway. I talked to my favorite geek a couple days ago, and he might actually be home relatively soon….fingers crossed!

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night and need to get this finished, so I’ll just give the highlights from the last couple days and then skip forward to today’s fun. I spent Thursday out at Cape Cod. I picked a fabulous time of year to go, the summer season is long over and there are next to no tourists. Plus, it was like 60 degrees out and perfect for hiking, which was a good thing since I think I walked about eight miles that day on the beach and breakwater while I was shooting waves and lighthouses. The clouds even cleared up enough towards the end of the day to give me a little bit of a sunset. The following day I drove down to Point Judith from New Bedford and caught the ferry over to Block Island. Unfortunately, the clouds were back in full force by that point and it was raining off and on, and downpouring by the time I was walking from the Northern Lighthouse down to the Mohegan Bluffs and Southeastern Lighthouse. All told, I think I walked about thirteen miles that day. Several people noticed me wandering around in the rain and stopped to ask if everything was okay and if I needed a ride. I’m sure they thought something must be wrong with me, walking in the rain and grinning away (I’d just gotten Chris’ news that morning.) I was having a great time, til I had to take the ferry back in sopping wet clothes and froze my butt off the entire ride. Yesterday morning I headed up to Taunton to check out the insane asylum there. I was highly disappointed to find that the section of the hospital that I was interested in shooting is completely surrounded by a huge black fence with tightly woven mesh (or something like that) so there wasn’t even any hope of shooting through it. Blah! From there I went into Boston where I drove around aimlessly, bored and uninspired (I’ve decided cities just don’t float my boat in the least), until I eventually drove south (by means of a very roundabout route since I made a wrong turn somewhere and was on the wrong freeway for a while, oops) to shoot the Scituate Lighthouse. I called it a day early and went back to Ayan and Sheetal’s for the party they were having to celebrate Sheetal’s birthday and Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Lots of good food, and their friends were very nice, though I missed a lot of the conversation since they were speaking in several different Indian languages.

I stayed up entirely too late and still managed to hit the road at seven this morning, though I was feeling rather lazy and skipped a couple of the cemeteries I was supposed to be shooting. I did, however, head to Norwich to check out the Norwich State Hospital, an abandoned insane asylum that I actually contacted people at the State Department in Connecticut about getting to permission to shoot…which they denied. Bastards. Unlike Tuscaloosa, I had no trouble finding the hospital – it’s in plain sight, spread across both sides of a main road. And unlike Taunton, there is no fencing, just signs announcing “State Property – No Trespassing.” I did a drive-by to get a feel for where the boundaries of the grounds were, and to see if there were any good places to park, which there weren’t. All of the roads into the hospital were blocked off with concrete barriers. I thought I’d be sneaky and see if I could drive around through a nearby neighborhood and find a backway in, but all I succeeded in doing was getting myself lost and winding up a couple towns away. I finally just parked my car in front of the Jewish cemetery next to the hospital and set off wandering down the sidewalk, trying to see how many shots my wussy self could get without actually trespassing. Some, but not as many as I wanted. I found a spot with several bushes close to the building nearest the road, which would hide me somewhat from any cars passing by if I decided to actually cross onto the property, and paced back and forth along the sidewalk indecisively. I’m not an adrenaline junkie, I don’t get my kicks from the possibility of getting arrested or having to pay huge fines that I very definitely cannot afford. Even so, I did eventually convince myself to make the mad dash through a little gate alongside one of the buildings. I’m sure I looked highly comical, running half bent with my big camera pack on my back. I’m so not meant to be a spy. Once I was out of sight of the road I felt much better and I wandered around for a while (exterior only, I know better than to enter the buildings…asbestos, dust, mold, water damaged floors, etc…yuck! though I did stick my camera through a hole in a door for one shot) before the security guard saw me. Talk about an “Oh, Shit…” moment. Lucky for me, he turned out to be one of the nicest security guards I’ve ever met. I told him I’d started off taking pictures from the sidewalk, and couldn’t resist a closer look, and how we just don’t have anything like this in Utah, and he just laughed. He took off in his truck to check out a vehicle that he’d just seen on the one of the roads, but found me again as I was escorting myself off the property. He was curious how I even knew about the asylum, being from Utah and all, which lead to a discussion about the Kirkbride facilities, and we eventually introduced ourselves and shook hands and chit-chatted for a bit about vandals breaking the windows and whatever did happen to the patients when the facility shutdown.

I eventually started on my way again, and decided I’d best not push my luck and skipped driving up to the Northampton asylum, opting instead to update my website. And thus I find myself in the parking lot in front of Panera Bread, again, having been kicked out once the cleaning was done, again, though tonight it’s not raining at least. Hmm. I might have spoken too soon. A few drops just hit my windshield. I’ll be checking out the Fairfield Hills State Hospital in the morning, though last I checked the town is still debating what to do with the land and in the meantime it’s been set aside as a park, so no trespassing should be required. The Long Island lighthouses are on the agenda for Tuesday, and then I must tear myself away from the coast and start working my way home…. Eight more days…..