Greetings from Panera Bread in Augusta! I’ve been here since before seven this morning, about 9 1/2 hours now, I’m working on my second bagel, and I’ve also eaten lunch here…I’m Finally caught up on the editing though (well, with everything that was in the “Edit Now” folder…the “Edit Later” folder just keeps getting uglier). I was supposed to have left hours ago if I wanted to make it to Acadia National Park before sunset, but I decided I needed to sit and edit and update, I’ve been stressing about when I was going to get all that done. It’s been a really busy last few days, but I think things are finally calming down again. I have my brand new camera now (and my sister has just ever so kindly offered to lend me money so I can pay that off and not pay interest on it) and hopefully I won’t be having to make any more several hundred mile detours in the near future.
After leaving the Panera in Grand Haven last WednesdayI started contemplating when I was going to be able to get my increasingly temperamental camera fixed, and realized that I was running out of business days if I wanted to avoid missing my campground reservations in New Hampshire and Maine. I wound up hurrying down to Cleveland Thursday and went to Dodd Camera to have them take a look at it. Their senior repair technician was out of the office that day and Nancy, though very helpful, wasn’t comfortable with diagnosing my camera so I took my camera back and set off for Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the repair would just have to wait til the next day.
As I was trying to find my way down to the park I drove by the Garfield Heights Post Office and remembered all the backup discs that I needed to mail home, which prompted me to meet Mary, one of the ladies at the counter there. She was wonderful and not only gave me directions, but also told me about her favorite historic cemetery there in Cleveland, Lakeview Cemetery. After spending a while taking pictures at Brandywine Falls (I’m still on that “texture” kick and wound up obsessing over the different rock colors along the trail to the falls) and then headed down to The Ledges area of the park. I really had no idea what to expect there, but it wound up being an extremely interesting place. I should have paid more attention to what kind of rock it was, but there were large moss covered cliffs with caves and narrow cracks you could hike through. And more really cool rock textures! I finally was forced to leave when it started to get dark and I wound up heading back up to Cleveland so I could find a Walmart and scout out the cemetery location in case I had time in the morning before going back to the camera shop.
I actually found the cemetery easily enough, though it turned out to be in a rather bad part of town, with many condemned buildings lining the road along the one side of it. I then managed to get lost while trying to find my way back to the Walmart I was intending to park at for the night, and my scenic tour of Cleveland took me through more bad neighborhoods, and then some Extremely wealthy ones with huge houses (very pretty, even in the dark), and I also stumbled across Case Western Reserve University, where my mom got her Masters. And, after all that, I never did wind up having time Friday to go back to the cemetery!
I won’t bore you again with the details of my conversation with Miguel, the great technician who didn’t have the parts to fix my camera, but also didn’t charge me for the diagnosis either. After convincing myself that buying the new Canon 5D Mark II was my best route, and then tracking one down (they’ve been out since the end of last year but the demand is still greater than the supply) I set off for Niagara Falls. It rained as I drove through Pennsylvania and was still quite gloomy when I arrived at the falls so I wasn’t too worried about just barely having missed sunset. A big thank you to the state park employee there who gave me a ride back to my car in his golf cart – I’d stopped him to ask if they tow vehicles parked down on the parkway after dark, and he didn’t think that area was well lit enough for me by myself and wanted me to move my car to the much better lit Goat Island parking lot since it was just hitting 8pm and turning into free parking. I really do meet nice people everywhere I go. With my car moved to Goat Island, I set off to catch the falls lit up at night. Huge spotlights on the Canadian side of the falls illuminate both American Falls and Horseshoe Falls until midnight, and certain days of the week during the summer season they also set off fireworks. I was originally supposed to have made to to Niagara Falls on my 2006 trip, but a freak snowstorm lead me to change my plans. I was very glad I finally made it. I generally don’t care for the big waterfalls – little dainty ones photograph much better, but Niagara Falls was worth seeing…especially rainbow colored!
The following morning I hiked around the falls again and crossed the Rainbow Bridge to Canada (the best views are from the Canadian side, and I’d gone through the trouble of getting a passport card since my passport had expired, and I was determined to use it) but it was just extremely overcast so I didn’t stick around long. I needed to be in New York City the next day to purchase camera batteries and an L-bracket for my new camera, and as I was looking at the map to see what my best route would be, I noticed highlighter marks in Pennsylvania. As luck would have it, Ricketts Glen State Park was more or less on my way. I’d come across the park, known for its waterfalls, when I was doing my research and had wanted to go there, but it was nowhere near my intended route and didn’t make the cut. I also knew there had been a New York state park I had wanted to go to, also for its waterfalls, but I hadn’t given myself any highlighter clues for it and couldn’t remember the name. Oddly enough though, as I was driving down to Ricketts Glen, I saw the name “Watkins Glen” on a freeway sign and instantly knew that was the park I had been trying to think of, and quickly exited the freeway to head to the park.
Watkins Glen kept reminding me of a rain forest crossed with some sort of medieval castle. Stone walkways and staircases wound through tunnels alongside waterfalls and streams, with lots of greenery along many of the cliff walls. It was well worth the detour. I had also correctly remembered that Ricketts Glen was indeed known for its waterfalls, but what I hadn’t realized was that the Falls Trail actually looped through a whopping twenty-one waterfalls. The 3 1/2 mile trail took me as many hours to complete the next morning since I stopped constantly. I would have taken longer had the sun not started to shine on most of the falls along one half of the loop, which was just as well. I was starting to worry that I wasn’t going to make it to B&H before they closed. I made good time on the remainder of the drive to NYC, and was so thankful that it was Sunday…traffic was tolerable and I managed to make it in and out of Manhattan without stressing too much. I also didn’t have to deal with the whole parking issue since B&H has a very small lot and I was spending enough money there for my short stay to be free. I was rather concerned however, since the lot was rather full and I wound up leaving my car parked on the sidewalk, keys in the ignition, so that the parking lot attendant could move my car once space opened up.
The B&H store was actually way more nerve-wracking that driving in the city. It’s a massive photography and video equipment store, and though I’m sure their system works well and keeps theft to a minimum, I found it highly confusing. There is one entrance (bags must be left at the front) and one exit, and shopping is done by going to the counter in each department where they add your item to your “shopping cart” through their computer and you receive a ticket to take to the cashier. After paying, you go through the merchandise pickup line, where your items have already been bagged and are hanging on a numbered hook. I lucked out and the gentleman at the order processing line was able to enter my purchases into the computer without me having to go to each of the departments since I already knew exactly what I needed. Still, I’d much prefer buy from them online.
Shopping successfully completed (my car and all my gear did just fine with the B&H attendants), I started heading north, figuring I’d go ahead and shoot Bash Bish Falls on my way up to Manchester, New Hampshire to pick up my camera, which would allow me to change my route on the way down the coast from Maine. I realized I also wasn’t that far from the Fairfield Hills State Hospital and decided to stop there as well. The hospital has been closed for quite some time, but the grounds are open to the public as a park. Since I was there in 2006, a couple of the buildings have been remodeled and it looks like they’re starting work on the main Kirkbride building as well, it looked like all the old peeling paint had been removed from the columns and entrance way. I wandered for a while, but it was gloomy, and only cleared up just as the sun was starting to set.
I started Monday morning off at Bash Bish Falls, a pretty little waterfall in the southwestern corner of Massachusetts. The sign at the trail head warned about Timber Rattlesnakes and showed a photo of one in some leaves, and also noted that two snakes had been seen on one of the trails a couple days before. This of course set off my snake paranoia (I’ve encountered three snakes on this trip so far, all of them very clearly garter snakes, which don’t bother me) and I really didn’t have any fun taking pictures at the falls since I was in such a high state of alert. Intrigued by a couple other highlighter marks on my road atlas, I took a slightly longer route to Manchester and detoured by Northampton to see if the insane asylum there had been torn down yet (it had) and checked out the cemetery in historic Deerfield, which wasn’t all that exciting but did have a lot of 250 year old graves.
My revised plan had intended for me to pick up my camera and then head out to Vermont to shoot three waterfalls there before heading to the campground at Franconia Notch, but my dilly-dallying had caused me to run late. It seemed silly to drive all the way out to the falls when I’d only have an hour there to shoot, especially since the campground was due north of Manchester. I opted to instead start the editing process since I stumbled across a Panera there (I really can edit while seated at the Rubbermaid tub in the back of my car, but it’s just so much more comfortable to sit in a chair, at a table…) and then charged my new camera battery (the charger came with the camera itself, so I had been unable to charge the batteries I’d purchased the day before) on the way up to Franconia Notch. The 5D Mark II has all sorts of new features (it took Canon three years to come out with the new version of my old 5D) and I actually had to read quite a bit of the manual to understand the new options. Having spent yesterday shooting with the new camera, I’m really liking it, though with 21 megapixels, I’ll be making a lot more backup discs than I’d expected. Of course this also means I can make some really big enlargements, not that I know what I’d do with anything that big!
Getting closer to the end, we’re up to yesterday now! I woke up Monday night around 2am to the sound of rain pounding on the roof of my car, and was reminded of the last time I was in New Hampshire – after it downpoured for twelve hours straight, nearly all of the waterfalls I had intended to shoot had turned into monster falls that put out too much spray to even want to take the camera out of the pack. Thankfully, the rain was short-lived, and Franconia Notch State Park was awesome. I spent a while hiking around the free trails while I waited for the entrance to the Flume Gorge to open. Short of being there when everything was in peak leaf change, my timing couldn’t have been better. I was one of the first people into the gorge, and this late in the season, I really didn’t have to compete with hordes of tourists so I often had the narrow boardwalk to myself, which was good since my tripod took up most of it. Ferns and moss lined the rocks and water flowed through the gorge with Avalanche Falls up at the far end. The sun threatened to come out several times, but overall remained nicely overcast, perfect for shooting waterfalls. The park was very cool, and well worth the thirteen bucks it cost me to get in there. It was made even better by the new camera, since I knew that I could shoot long exposures and not have to worry about editing out the various dead pixels that would have appeared with my old camera. (Speaking of which, I’d had to chance cleaning the sensor after I saw the Niagara Falls photos – the camera tech had wandered around with the camera body without a lens, and it had collected all sorts of dust during that and when he was testing the CCD Converter – it was the quickest I’ve ever cleaned the sensor – swab in, swab out! and I knew I wasn’t very thorough, but any dust I got off the sensor was an improvement!)
After dragging myself away from Franconia Notch, I stopped at a couple other New Hampshire waterfalls and then decided to take advantage of the still gloomy day by fitting in the Maine waterfalls I had planned to shoot this morning. Unfortunately, my directions for two of the falls weren’t all that great (I think he had a dyslexic moment and the 2.5 miles was probably more like 5.2) and it took me well over an hour of driving up and down this crappy back road before I stumbled across the right trail) and then after I hiked out to the falls, the water level was so slow that they were thoroughly uninteresting. By that time I was annoyed enough that I opted to skip the neighboring Dunn Falls, which likely were also too low to be of interest, so I instead skipped ahead to Screw Auger Falls, which thankfully proved to be extremely well marked, and quite pretty.
And I think that pretty much covers everything…it had better, it’s now dinner time and I’ve been at Panera for oh, 11 1/2 hours… I’ll be in Maine for the next several days, and since the sun is down before seven each night, and I no longer have to worry about editing out mass quantities of dust spots and dead pixels and scratches out of my photos, I should be able to keep up with the editing and be ready to post again from Portland on Monday…After having just kind of winged things and ignored the trip plan so much lately, it’s kinda strange to actually know where I intend to be and when again!
New photos have been posted in the Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.