As the sun rose we were well on our way north. Since this time Dave wouldn't need anything in the way of navigational aid and it would be daylight while heading into and through Tennessee, I had my camera out at times just to play around with taking a few pics now and then. Here are some shots of the mountains in Tennessee along I-75...
I just liked the name of this road—you just know there has to be story behind it. Hmmm, I just Googled Stinking Creek Road and found a couple blog entries regarding the name, one from Connie Emerald Eyez and one from Autumn Snow, but the latter one is pretty much the same road sign pic (and just the pic) as I took and the former one shows the more immediate sign for the road's exit off I-75. Apparently I'm not the only person ever to find the name unusual enough to snap a pic of the sign.
The second shot above is as we were arriving back in Cincinnati around 5 PM and that's Paul Brown stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL. It so happened that they had been playing a game when we left sunday (tying the Philadelphia Eagles 13-13) and were getting ready to play another game (I don't remember the opponent or the outcome now, but it doesn't matter) on the thursday we arrived back in Ohio.
We stayed in Cincinnati overnight before heading up I-75 the next day to Dave's place about 2 hours north near Lima. (I should probably mention that as a church minister, Dave and his wife live mostly in Cincy in the parsonage of the church, but their actual home is near Lima.) There were some snow flurries in the forecast and the sky ahead looked odd as Dave was driving. The following four shots show the clouds in the distance, then an obvious snow flurry very close ahead (though we weren't in it yet), and then all of a sudden it was like we drove into a wall of falling snow. It wasn't a gradual start, instead there was no snow and then—Bam!—snow all around us. Well, it wasn't a blizzard or anything like that, but I'm more used to seeing flurries start gradually, a flake here and there and then picking up little by little.
Luckily the flurry didn't last. The next morning there were six deer in the field behind the house, including a couple of bucks, one a particularly big one. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a decent pic of them, but I got one shot which shows a couple does closer (as close as my camera could zoom in, anyway). Then we got to work cutting up a felled tree which was actually in the corner of the woods behind the field where the deer are in the first shot below (you can see the upper branch portions of the tree where they were dragged out into the field more in the first shot below). Dave used his chain saw to cut the thick trunk into big cross-sectioned pieces which we then rolled over to the hydraulic wood splitter he has on the back of one of his John Deere tractors. Splitting wood isn't too bad when you have the proper equipment and we ended up with a couple wagon loads of firewood (first one shown below).
Dave has a thing for John Deere tractors and this 720 (from the 50s, I think) is his current pride and joy, having just been restored...
I'll finish up with just some shots of the Ohio countryside. These are all from along Route 30 where I was starting out my own ride back to New Jersey. The road is a two-lanes-each-direction divided highway and there was hardly any traffic on it, so I got adventurous and tried taking a few one-handed shots as I was driving along. (Hey, there may be laws against driving while on a cell phone, but I don't know if there are any expressly forbidding taking pictures with an actual camera—as opposed to a camera phone—while you drive!) I think they came out surprisingly well (much better than I expected) and give a good idea of the wide open farmland in that part of Ohio.
Feedburner
5 comments:
Wow, Dim Skip! The shot just before the snow overtook you is just outstanding. Blue sky and then POW!
Thanks so much for the rest. Tennessee is beautiful mountain country. Ohio reminds me of Jersey, as a matter of fact. :-)
Glad you liked'em, Angel. That sequence showing the transition (within literally just a few minutes) from sunshine to significant snow falling is my favorite set from the trip. I don't recall ever having been in another situation like that where the weather changed so suddenly.
If it's possible, that area of Ohio around Lima is flatter (and more open) than rural NJ, but you're right, it isn't all that different really. Actually, I was surprised at how Jersey-like Dan's corner of Alabama is too, at least as far as the parts of Jersey I'm most familiar with, the Pine Barren-y parts. If it weren't for the red clay and a few cotton fields, I wouldn't have noticed hardly any difference at all. BTW, I'd never seen an actual cotton field before, but I didn't have my camera handy for any cotton-y shots. This is about what they looked like, though. There were only a few small fields near Dan's area, but they obviously stood out as quite different from crops I'm used to seeing.
States with actual mountains (such as Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania) are always the most obviously and drastically different from southern NJ leaving no chance of ever forgetting I'm out of the state.
I'm not a frequent traveler, but I do enjoy driving and getting to see other parts of the country up close on those occasions when I venture over and beyond the Delaware River.
...and here are two closeup images of cotton.
For some reason, I just never thought much of cotton as something that came from a plant (though intellectually I knew it). It always was just something that came in ball form collected in bags or pre-attached to the ends of Q-tips, but I had no clue how it looked in a field.
Now I know how a friend's girlfriend (at that time) felt when he brought her to my house once and she got to see asparagus growing in the neighbor's garden. I've been familiar with asparagus in fields since I was little so it was no big deal to me, but she was amazed to see the spears growing right out of the dirt.
Cotton, yes cotton grows in Arizona, so that first shot of a cotton field is exactly what I remember. The close ups are not. I never stopped and got out of my car, obviously. :-)
I DID notice (hey I'm good) that Alabama did look a lot like the Lima Ohio pictures you took last year. Dirt roads, flat land, trees. All you needed was a train track. :-)
You have a good memory! Now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing any train tracks at all down there other than one little side track in a town we went through and that might not even be used anymore. But the explanation is probably just that we weren't near any majorly developed areas. Whereas Lima has a huge train history from the days of the Baldwin Locomotive works and was no doubt a major hub for freight servicing the surrounding relatively close cities like Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago... not to mention just being fairly centrally located in the country as a whole.
Post a Comment