A barcampLA buddy, Jeremy Kitchen, tweeted something out a few months ago about getting ready for the Tour de Palm Springs, an annual bike ride made up of a number of routes. Here’s Kitchen:

The timing was pretty good for me to start thinking about training for their century ride. I ride nearly every weekend, but usually only 20 to 40 miles, mostly with this crew:

Jen, Grace, Peter, Brad, and moi.

I’d need to ramp that up to get ready for the century. I didn’t know if I could do the 8-10 hours on the bike, and I’d never ridden that terrain before. Tracey from work had ridden the course last year and got me some route and elevation info. Here’s the official Tour de Palm Springs route map:

The scary part of any ride is the elevation and how much effort that will take to climb. Here’s the elevation profile for the ride, taken from the awesome Veloroutes site:

So, a lot of climb at the beginning of the ride when my legs will be fresh, followed by a lot of downhill, then a gradual climb to the finish. I was having a hard time comparing it to my hardest regular climb, the 1.6 miles and 440 ft. at the Torrey Pines grade, because the distances are so different, so I started plotting out rides around San Diego with a lot of sustained climb. I combined my regular run from Penasquitos (PQ) and up the coast with a leg inland to Escondido to form a box back to PQ.

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I rode this route the first time just to see if I could do 50 miles without much prep, and it went well. I was dog tired after, but I really didn’t eat or hydrate well. I rode the route again with Peter from work a few weeks later, and it felt good, even with a stop at Churchill’s Pub in San Marcos for a beer and a sammich in the middle!

The thumb is Peter’s. He likes to get into the shot a lot:

That was a ride we did up to Pt. Loma – a fair amount of climb. Peter has a lot of experience with long rides and gave me great advice on ibuprofen and caffeine use to make the ride a lot more tolerable.

I realize I’m writing a lot about the pre-ride, rather than the ride itself so far, but I think that’s appropriate because the only way I survived this ride was because of the preparation beforehand. But, let’s get to the ride itself!

Elaine and I took Friday off to make it a super long Ride, Valentine’s, and President’s Day weekend. Nathan kindly agreed to come home from SDSU and keep an eye on Erin (or vice verse?), so we were free to take off. It’s nice getting old and having kids who can watch each other! Kitchen was arriving on Friday too, so we got together for a beer and plotted out the ride. Kitchen and I had never ridden together, so I was stressing about slowing him down. I’m a big dude and it takes some time for me to get up hills. He also had another buddy, Mike, who I’d never met, which added another variable to the mix. Elaine and I were staying in Palm Desert, about 30 minutes from the start of the race. Kitchen had gotten a room less than a mile from the start, so we decided to meet in his parking lot in the chilly, 46F morning of the ride.

I had the bike in pieces in the trunk, so I got my pretty hands dirty:

You can see Kitchen has a much heavier, touring bike. He’s getting ready for Ragbrai, a week long ride in Iowa, so he carried a pannier too. Mike also had a heavy bike, so this helped us all keep pace on the initial climbs. We bid farewell to Elaine and biked over for the 7am ride start. There were thousands of riders at the start, so we were let go in waves. We met up with Mike and got released to start at about 7:30a.

I set my trip odometer to zero:

and off we went!

We worked our way out of Palm Springs, crossed the 10, then started climbing and climbing and climbing… Actually, I train on hills a lot in San Diego, so I felt pretty good. I quickly shed my long gloves, outer shell, and thanked Kitchen for talking me out of wearing the Under Armor shirt I was planning on. I got down to just a jersey and was very comfortable for the rest of the day. Jeremy took a great shot as he passed us at one point:

There were 5 SAG support stops on the ride, and we arrived at the first at the end of the initial climb, at about 15 miles. The support was great on this race! They had water in bottles and big coolers, Chex Mix, peanut M&Ms, fig bars (this IS date country, after all), and an electrolyte drink. Each station was run by very nice people who took great care of us.

I’d been training to continuously eat on a ride this long (ok, I’ve been training for that all my life, but HERE it was appropriate… ). I’d brought a bunch of gel blocks, both regular and with caffeine, to keep me going. I’d also broken up 8 Trio bars (nuts, fruit, cane juice) into two bags, one of which I put in my newly acquired Novara Quick Draw Bike Pack (it’s just like the Bento Boxes that some of my friends have):

This bag turned out to be great! I wasn’t fishing around in my back pockets for food, and having it in my line of sight kept reminding me to grab a bite every 10 or 15 minutes. I packed WAY too much food, eventually only going through one bag of Trio bar pieces, one normal gel block, and one caffeinated. I kept refilling the Novaro bag at all of the SAG stops with Chex Mix and guilt free M&Ms and this was enough to keep me going. The SAG stop at 50 miles had simple sandwiches so I grabbed one of those and felt no hesitation in slathering it with mayo!

There were a number of routes in the tour, including a 55 miler that my friend Kevin was riding. We met up at the second SAG and I gave him trouble for taking the easy way When I finally finished my ride a long while later, he was already home in San Marcos!

I tried to get 10 or 15 minutes of rest at each SAG stop. I was very worried about running out of steam all of a sudden, so I kept fighting the urge to join fast pelotons as they sped by. I did my best to stay with Kitchen and Mike to make sure my pace didn’t wear me out, but I have to admit that the downhills were too enticing to hold back. I zoomed on ahead as we neared the 50 mile mark and waited at that SAG station for Kitchen. Mike was still fighting a cold, so he’d faded back a bit and arrived just about as we were to take off again. He hung out at the SAG and we got moving. Mike’s in the back left filling up his water bottles:

I got Jeremy to shoot me being cute:

At the 70 mile SAG, we met up with Elaine in La Quinta and she shot a few pictures:

Mike caught up and then we were off again!

I had 30 miles left and was feeling pretty good. I was dropping ibuprofen every four hours, and I think I’d had half of a caffeinated gel block package. I was feeling almost no fatigue and I wanted to see what I could do. My average speed was about 11 miles per hr so far, but I knew I’d been holding back out of the fear of bonking. After about 5 miles, Mike and Kitchen seemed to be doing great at their pace and I decided to punch it up. We were on a relatively flat part of the route and I started pushing at about 19mph. I got to the 90 mile SAG point,

stopped for a few minutes for water and electrolytes, then zoomed on without stopping until the trip meter on my bike computer said exactly 100.0 and snapped a picture.

Then I wound my way through the rest of Palm Springs to the finish line!

Kitchen joined me soon afterward, and talked some group out of a beer:

Then Mike made his triumphant appearance!

Elaine met us at the finish and got a nice shot of me with the ride tshirt:

Some stats:

Average Speed: 14.1 mph
Max Speed: 36.9 mph
Time in Motion: 7h 10m
Actual Time on the Ride: 9h

Lessons learned:

Don’t overdress. It’s so easy to overheat.
Don’t carry so much food. Or rather, become very familiar with exactly what will be provided on the ride.
Don’t be intimidated by scary elevation charts. Ok, this ride isn’t all that strenuous in terms of climb, but I almost let the chart scare me out of trying.
Top-tube-mounted bags are awesome, even if they look kinda dinky. I kept my engine running at top speed from just nibbling out of the bag every 10 – 20 mins. It scares me to think how often I’ve done that riding a couch rather than a bike.
Get a room closer to the start of the race. The morning logistics meant I had to get up 45 minutes earlier than needed.
If a ride has thousands of riders, don’t sweat the 7a start time. It’s ok to be a little late.
Unless you’re going for performance, don’t be at the front of the pack. I was amazed by how many people I saw pulled off to the side, changing tubes. I was also happy there was a huge crowd ahead soaking up road debris
Tweet out your progress. I got wonderful support in real time from Twitter and Facebook as I was riding! Thanks folks!!!
Get a small camera that can go on the bike. I should have more pictures, but the iPhone camera mechanisms are a joke when you’re on a bike.
If the ride is in Palm Springs, bring your own beer. Man, that town suffers from the lack of craft brews. Babe’s BBQ is a notable exception, and the Tap Room had Dogfish Head 90 Minute and Spaten Optimator. Their parking lot was impossible tho.
Ibuprofen is your friend. Before, during, and after the ride.

One more picture!

There was a rogue photographer (Stevesphotos.org), my favorite kind!, on the ride who got this image:

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First we saw some cute animal pottery. Look, a monkey:

Monkey funny.

Pigs, cats, dogs, cows funny:

Wait, why is that frog caged in wire? Are those flies? Hmm, well, cute little wood flies. I guess that’s ok. We should have taken this as a warning… The panda led us into a false sense of security:

Awww! Panda cute!

Here is where the story becomes frightening. Sensitive views need to turn away because:

ARGHHHH!!! WTF is THAT?!? Why is it leering at me?!? What does it know? Why???

Maybe I need to back up and take another look:

NO! That doesn’t help!!! What is going on? What is that expression? Smug? Knowing? And, for the love of all that is holy, what is that puppy doing there? Oh, the answer became clear as we continued deeper into Dante’s Gift Store…

Here was our first real hint that all was not right in this falsely friendly store. Here is clear coercion of a stuffed, um, penguin? koala? lemur? Either way, there was a tiny army forcing these innocents into subservience. If only it was just that because turning once again around a corner reveals:

OMG!!! Fluffy, and all the Fluffy family?!? CARNAGE!!! Heads strewn about! I couldn’t look at it… had. to. look. away.

GAH!!! That look says, “Where is my body? I was your best friend. And apparently I have a conjoined twin who also deserved this fate?!?” Poor Beagley! Can it get any worse?!? Oh yes, my friends:

Oh, the humanity!!! Caninity? Either way, who lops the heads off of two fluffy dogs, then ties a bow on one? And why??? Where will it end?

OH NOES!!! Horsey!!! It seems even crueler to leave them two legs as a mockery of their former glory….

I must certainly have reached the bottom of this pitted hell, but no, my friends. The saga continues (and if I weren’t so lazy I’d pretend this had something to do with hell’s layers, but that’s not gonna happen)…

You must be thinking, as I did before I lost all innocence, “Where are all the feet in this charnel house?” Please… don’t look…

Yes, they make a joke of pedal amputation. Ok, it’s kinda funny, but, sadly, I’ve lost all sense of humor at this point. Feet and legs were not done being abused:

Why do the evil candy corn (which is redundant if you ask me) and the fat penguin have spindly legs? Do penguins even HAVE legs? And WTF did they do to this turkey to make it bleed from the eye?

Think we’ve hit the bottom? Do ya, really? NO. 7 words: Sea Turtle Nipple Piercing and Fish Suspension… Yes, friends, I documented the abuse:

And I think they’re endangered or something. Now you know why…

Ok, if you haven’t chosen to avert your eyes yet, this next image is going to rip your heart out:

Yes, they ripped his heart out. Then they installed a zipper so they could do it whenever they pleased. This is Vladimir Harkonnen level evil, friends. (Go Google it. Then watch that other nightmare, “Dune”.)

So, they defile dogs, horses, teddy bears… but they’d never hurt a bunny, right? Please, no. NO BUNNIES!!! WHAT’S IN THE BOX?????

NO!!! Make it stop!!! Ah, a nice kitty!

Finally, some kindness in this dystopia… but, Kitty, why do you have that odd expression? WAIT!!! What did they DO to you KITTY??? NO!!!!

They scooped out yer brain and made you into a single serving tea pot?!? WTF is a single serving tea pot??? How many times can one blog post say WTF??? But really, W.T.F??!

A billion disembodied Santas scream at the injustice. Scream on, Santa. Santas. Or are you laughing? Are you IN ON THIS?!? Who is THIS guy?!?

How can he be happy?

Oh no, there are MORE of them! These are the minion of the Master, enslaving masses… indoctrinating:

brainwashing…

And heaven can not help you if you fail:

I must escape! I must get the word out! I don’t have time to fight the boss level. I sneak, soundlessly toward the door. I’m almost there. Then… NO!!!

I knew it… St. Francis is finally getting back for all of the Assisi jokes. The world is doomed. Save yourself.

Good thing I had the iPhone with the Wordpress app to send all this before I was smoted. Smited? app needs spell check…

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Twitter has killed my blog updating… Trying to find a nice lazy way to kill two birds with one stone, but not be too annoying.

I’m late to the contest, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

Click here to vote for it.

Thanks!

Here’s what the image looks like on SoCal Photo Contest’s page:

Doesn’t look as good rendered as a tiny thumbnail!

Here are the happy parents!

Nice work Erin!

(with Mr. Sykes, the drama coach)

Then on Thursday, Erin walked for her promotion ceremony:

There was pretty music:

which caused a lot of hugging:

and smiles:

and posing:

I’ve always wanted to go and Elaine and I were up in SF for the weekend, so I made it! I walked into the building above and assumed that was the whole thing. It was an enormous place with tons of exhibits.

The first one that caught my eye was a dude polishing a piece of glass for a telescope mirror:

I didn’t quite get how it worked, but it was fascinating to watch.

Next I saw a huge living sculpture of old plastic 2 liter bottles:

There was a line and pulley system that caused the ring of bottles to undulate in a wave.

There were many robot sculptures:

and scary vacuum guns!

These bike wheel LEDs were very cool! I almost bought the kit, but resisted… My birthday is coming up, hint hint…

I think this was part of The Long Now’s 10,000 year clock. I just thought it was cool:

Next I saw Tesla coils! They set up a board with hot dogs along a wire for the current to pass through:

Then there were more robots:

Some of the robots got all evil and started decapitations:

SOLDERING IS NOT A CRIME!

I was getting hungry by this point, so I stepped out of the building to get some food and discovered that there was 4x more Faire to cover:

This one was giving me the eye:

I want to try hanging a camera from a kite! Can I borrow your camera?

The robots were really being mean to children even…

Then they went all cyborg on this poor innocent:

This is the robot conversion factory:

The humans allowed to live had to pass through a life sized Mousetrap Game:

One hall was full of crafts and the witches who ply their trade:

and odes to their false idols:

ok, that’s a pretty cool ode – a yarn FSM!

And what would a trip to NoCal be without hippies and their dirty habits:

It’s sad what happened to some of the humans:

but I will admit to eating all the chocolate and vanilla ribbon off of the Hostess Cupcake car! Mmm, delicious!

Sheep lady’s twittering about seeing something stranger than her:

What could it be?

WOOP, der it is:

Some brave humans fought back the robot horde:

But in the end, who can fight robots?

Especially when they use child sympathizers:

I blame the XBoX generation for this madness.

But wait! There’s hope!

Mentos and Diet Coke save the day! And we all fly away:

and eat mushrooms:

and wear awesome coats:

Oh yeah, I ran into Andrew, Kim, and Site Con #3 (dammit, I can’t remember his name. Nice kid… )

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It boggles the mind…

In the whole trip, the only place we ran into a little weather was outside of Flagstaff where we picked up a light dusting of snow:

which broke as we came back down to the desert:

and gave me my only half-decent sunset picture of the trip:

I got to shoot London Bridge at night, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time:

Day:

Night:

Erin got bored, so we experimented with light writing:

Sadly, this summoned a monster which ate us. the end.

Actually, I kicked its butt:

We drove around the lake back into California:

and made a very important pit stop in Julian, CA:

In the time it took to take this picture, and it being Easter Sunday, Mom’s actually locked the door and denied us crumble topped apple pie goodness! So we went across the street to the malt shop and got a lovely piece of pie!

Erin looks shocked because I got her drinking a glass of ichor. Yep, she’s a vampire. See how sparkly she is in all the pictures.

Nine days, lots of bug guts, and 3000 miles later, we made it back home!

Yep, pretty much sums the place up.

My sister Diardra and her hubby Doug live in Arvada, CO right next to Denver:

Diardra gave us directions to the 16th Street Mall

which is right by the capitol:

Erin Yelped and found us some awesome Gyros at Shish Kabob:

We used Yelp a ton on this trip. With the location based iphone app, it worked very well!

I’d done some research before the trip and found that one of my favorite brewers is very close to Diardra’s house, so we took one evening and headed to Oskar Blues’ restaurant in Lyons, CO.

They are one of the first craft brewers who can their stuff, but I wanted to taste it from the tap. So I did:

God Bless sampler trays… Lotsa of lovely flavors and no huge hangover the next day

The place is very festive:

The staff was super nice. I was disappointed that the can price was no cheaper than our local places in San Diego. I had dreams of filling the trunk with cases of Ten Fidy and ruling the SoCal market.

The next morning we were supposed to drive to Albuquerque but how do you get THAT close to Rock Mountain National Park and not go take some pictures… This pattern seemed to rule the trip and make for very late night arrivals…

It’s a very dangerous park:

filled with scary creatures:

As usual, I’m ignoring the “thin ice” signs, although I think I was safe this time:

See the pretty lake behind us? Use your imagination. Or a large blow dryer…

Again, it was so hard not to just sit in one place and watch the light change. I like this shot, but imagine it at sunset…

“Welcome to Bear Lake!”

Six hours later we were on the road to AAAAAAaaaalbuquerque. Erin shot some neat weather:

Then it got dark and I made her listen to REO Speewagon for 8 hours straight!

But let’s be real, the real reason for the trip is JACK!

Jack is our new nephew and I hadn’t met him before this. He’s a wonderful little dude with a great disposition. Looks like he’ll have our sense of humor too:

He’s very curious about funny looking faces:

and he knows how to be cool:

Let’s just face it, this is a cute kid…

I didn’t really get to do much concentrated photography on this trip since we were on the move so much, but I did shoot this one night and was pretty happy with it:

I’d have been happier if the netting wasn’t there, but it was cold and dark and I didn’t notice it until I had the tripod all set up.

Aidan, Renia, and Jack live in a beautiful area, very close to Vail. We walked around their neighborhood quite a bit:

and took a side trip up to Vail to see the village and commune with the residents:

This dude was WAY into me:

After 2p, you can ride the gondolas up the mountain for free, so we did:

and enjoyed the beautiful views:

Erin made some sort of Ice Princess Shrine…

Then we all went out and enjoyed some “waters”:

and green goop:

We had a great time getting to meet Jack, and reuniting with Aidan and Renia!

I haven’t owned an ice scraper since Illinois, but thanks to my genetic influence, Erin’s a genius and we used the room key cards to scrape the windows.

We had a 7-8 hr drive to Denver ahead of us, so we swore we’d just spend an hour or so in Bryce… how hard could that be?

Erin wanted to prove she’d been in snow:

I made the world’s smallest snowman:

Erin shot a lot of our pix from the passenger seat, so she wanted a clean window:

Bryce is full of scenic view of hoodoos. What’s a hoodoo?

Those are. The way I understand it, the area used to be 3000 ft sand dunes, then a sea settled above that. The minerals in the sea seeped down into the sand, inconsistently, forming columns of cement in the sand. As the land was pushed up and the water ran out, it carried away the loose sand, leaving these amazing columns of fractal sand and cement.

There was usually someone at any stop who would trade a group shot if you did one for them:

The variations on the formations were beautiful:

I need a week in just this one spot to do it justice with a camera:

Ok, you get the point – it’s beautiful and everyone should go see it!

Six hours later, we dragged ourselves out of the park to start the 7 hr drive to Edwards, CO to see my brother. We lost the light soon, but I’ll never forget the drive:

Zion is a short trip off of I-15, just north on St. George, UT. We stopped at a little town called Springdale and looked at some rocks:

I decided then that I’d resist my rock collection obsession or else the car would be laden with 1000lbs as we headed over the Rockies later in the trip Erin got her Mom some earrings, and we headed into Zion proper. I didn’t know what to expect – I’d done some research for the trip, but I didn’t want to look at too many pictures before I saw it for myself.

There’s a $25 entry fee, then you leave your car at the visitor’s center and hop on a shuttle that runs the length of the park.

I’ll put a link in the blog to all of the pictures, but WOW! Just WOW! It was amazing:

Erin has the photography bug too. I got here here and I was using my iPhone – one of my favorite images from the trip:

I was drawn to the rocks mainly, while Erin loved the water features:

I got a new wide lens piece for my Lensbaby and tried it out here, but only got one or two interesting images:

I need to spend more time with it to learn how to get some part of the image in focus.

I can paste beautiful rock formation pictures in here all day:

I also got a 70-300 Canon IS lens to play with, and it didn’t disappoint:

Erin goes in search of more water pictures:

We encountered much wild life, such as the Thanksgiving bird:

We couldn’t find the stuffing gophers.

Where’s Erin?

I was going to have some deep comments about ageless stone and modern technology, but I remembered that I’m not that deep:

Finally found some phone signal!

It was getting late and we needed to get to Bryce for the next day, so we headed out through the tunnel on Rt. 12:

and found even more amazing sights:

SOMEone was getting a little tired of stopping every 5 minutes to take pix, but I have to say – this was one of the most amazing drives I have ever made. Beautiful!

Good bye Zion. I’ll be back, and I promise to spend more that a day….

to get to our first stop, Las Vegas! This was Erin’s first time so I wanted to make sure she saw the most important part, Barry Manilow!

Ok, not really – our goal was the Blue Man Group but first we needed to get a good meal. I looked out the window of our hotel and saw the Peppermill, a great place my buddy TJ intruduced me to on my last LV visit. Erin was impressed with the very colorful sugar:

Ok, so was I:

Next, we walked (and walked and walked) the Strip:

Caught some amazing magic:

Then finally saw the men of blue:

When I took Nathan to this show a few years ago, I neglected to bring a camera, so we missed this shot…

Erin really wanted to see the Excalibur, so we hoofed it down the Strip again after the show and she scored a nice image:

Sadly, the dragon statue is gone now. A guard told us that it was breaking down and they couldn’t get parts. I blame the IT department, or this Emo kid:

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I need to play with it more… I KNOW I went over 11 mph Not sure why there are so few data points. The phone was in my saddle bag, under the metal seat, and the big rider – so maybe that’s it

I took a lot of pictures as usual. They’re all up on Flicrk, but here are a few I really liked:

Our hotel was right across the street from the Rhode Island State house. I forgot to fix my white balance before I shot it, but I kinda like the effect:

If all of the cars in front were as old as the one in the middle, I could have pretended it was an old slide

Here’s a more “accurate” shot:

We headed over to the local mall’s food court for lunch:

Lotsa folks in that one – Mike Giarlo, Rob Cassion, Ross Singer, Phil Cryer.

I really enjoyed spending a few days with our intrepid Esme:

(He lives in Florida, Mike.)

Here Dan Chudnov does his Bollywood routine in celebration of Slumdog Millionaire’s big Oscar wins:

Jodi Schneider was thrilled to see me, as always:

I finally met Ed Summers, in the middle. It’s good to see him inspiring others as he does me. Bess Sadler is enjoying the fracas as well:

Gabe Farrell, on the right, forgot he owed me $20. Never do that. It gives me WAY too much license…

Mike Park left me waiting to be picked up at the airport:

Well ok, he mailed me 3 weeks before the event asking if I needed a ride and I sent him an itinerary and said I’d confirm closer to the flight. Three hours before the flight takes off doesn’t really count! Mike drove me, Esme, Brad, and Dan all over the place, either because he’s a great dude, or I’m good at making people feel guilty. Either way, I win! Thanks Mike for being a great host.

Actually, I gotta say that the whole Brown Univ (or is that Univ of Providence?) crew kicked ass in prep and execution of this conference. BRAVO Birkin, Jean, Bonnie, and other names I can’t remember because I drink a lot.

I also take a lot of pictures, so I’ll inevitably get something cool like this:

Heehee! I love my Lensbaby!

Pizza is good!

Did you know the lead singer of Saliva is a librarian?

Ross pretends to laugh at something while trying to ignore the fat dude sticking a camera in his face:

Just looking at this costs me 14 points:

Brad, Dan, and I visited the inside of the RI State House before we ran to the airport, and decided that we should hold the next code4lib in the Senate chambers:

Never get on that end of a canon, especially when I am on the other end…

As usual, way too many pictures here:

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Awesome seeing you all again!

Hit this link to see a big version.

And hit this link to see a huge version!

This is actually 2 shots from the Balboa Park bridge over Rt. 163, toward downtown San Diego. I used Autostitch to put them into one shot.

More pix from that night here:

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I also started playing around with long exposures:

This one was very long, maybe 10 minutes. In fact, by the time I went back out to close the shutter, the fog had rolled back in:

I noticed later that I had captured some of Jupiter’s moons. You can see a little bit of light from the spot on the right:

You may need to go to the Flickr page and view the large originals to see it better.

I also liked the foggy light last night and shot this as I was coming in:

Here are all the pix, and a link to Flickr:

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D

Especially thanks to you guys for giving me yer moneyz!!!

D

Gabe wanted something stronger:

Please feel free to use them.

I need to tone the sky down on that one. I’m reading a book about image editing and this will be one of the ones I’ll pour some work into.

This one is a little contrived, but hey, it gets the path, some fall colors, and water:

The word “gloaming” kept coming into my head:

I didn’t know how much of the sky I wanted, so I tried leaving it out. Kinda works:

I was able to get behind one of the falls and shoot with a flash to get the droplets:

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Great colors:

And library geeks playing games:

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It was such a neat collection of historical and modern works, and people actually making things. I’m so glad I went!

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They have a neat house in the woods:

Which let me grab some Fall color:

We hadn’t seen each other in 12 years, but we talked like we’d seen each other yesterday. Thanks for a great visit, Maureen!

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