On my drive through the Deep South, visiting family and friends, I hadn't expected to go to a rodeo--but one had come to town when I was staying with my former UW-Sheboygan colleagues Royce and Joy Shaw, who were now at Newberry College in South Carolina. (See my previous post for our excursion to Charleston.) It was a good occasion to try out 'action photography' with my Nikon, and on this occasion the camera was 'behaving,' or else I was choosing the right settings.
A day or two before the rodeo we made another side trip, to a town I had never heard of, Washington GA, not far from the SC border. It has some well-preserved public buildings, some predating the Civil War, but the pictures I took were of stately mansions:
--plus one, in between the first two houses above, of an abandoned merry-go-round:
As for the rodeo and its real horses, it had all the usual events: bull-riding, as in my photo at the top of this post; calf-roping, as you see next:
. . . and bronco-busting:
I slightly cropped this last photo, but it might look best if cropped quite a bit more:
In any case, here are a few more pictures I took that afternoon:
And here is Joy at the rodeo:
The Shaws were poodle-fanciers. They had a darker, smaller one when they lived in Sheboygan--see BOXES 106-107--and now had a well-groomed white one:
After Newberry, SC, I stopped in Washington DC to have lunch with a cousin and to visit museums on the Mall, but I didn't take pictures. That night I was back in New York with friends from Columbia days. As was typically the case during my NY stays, I took very few photos, though I see that on this occasion I visited two famous mansions near Tarrytown, on the Hudson north of the city. The first was Lyndhurst, the Gothic Revival sprawl whose most famous owner was railroad tycoon Jay Gould (and which stood in for 'Collinwood' in the 1970s movies of Dark Shadows):
The second, more modest mansion was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's home:
I most likely would have visited such places with Ed Foster or Mike Bavar, but possibly I was with David and Pat Hartwell, since my only other NY photos from this trip are of their kids, Alison and Geoff (and they lived in Pleasantville, not very far from Tarrytown):
On the way back to the Midwest I stopped in Dauphin, PA, near Harrisburg, for my second visit to the Hicks family in that location (cf. BOXES 108-110 for the previous visit). Here's a view of Jim in his garden:
And here are the three kids, Aaron, Becca and Jordan, plus a cat in one pic:
I see that the Hicks' friend Shozo was visiting at the same time; here he is with Jim and then with the whole family: the woman on Mary's left was, I think, his wife.
We took an excursion up the Susquehanna River to a little town called Millersburg, where there was an operating sternwheel paddleboat ferry. (I don't know about 1979, but today it's the last ferry on the Susquehanna in operation, and the last such boat in use anywhere.) The following shots show a wider view of the river valley, then the ferry approaching our side of the river:
I took a photo of the ferry's quaint cabin as well as ones of the paddlewheel and the river itself, plus Aaron, soon joined by Mary and the other kids:
Finally, here is a boy evidently auditioning for a production of Huckleberry Finn:
. . . and one more of the river valley, at sunset:
Back in Ohio I took only a couple of photos, occasioned by a new clown fountain set up in Jim and Dottie's back yard in Brunswick, to the delight of Jamie and a neighbor kid:
At some point during my Cleveland stay, we drove to Pennsylvania for another family wedding--and then, rather than drive directly back to Sheboygan, I took an indirect route, out to Santa Monica and up the California coast before heading back via Utah and Wyoming. I'll report on these trips in my next post.
Comentários