Close the Door on 2022 and let the new year begin. Happy New Year
Video below of my rendition of celebrating a new year. Immersed in nature at sunset. Or click here; New Year Celebration with Nature
May your new year be filled with love, family, friends and new adventures. Where ever they may take you, get out and explore. Live as if tomorrow may never come and as if today will last forever. Live in the moment and take in every bit of the great outdoors when you can.
Wormsloe Mile Long Entrance avenue lined with live oaks is a classic image from the moonlight and magnolias Old South. Found here in Savannah GA.
In the 1890s, Wymberley Jones De Renne laid out the live oak avenue, to celebrate the birth of his son.
A breathtaking avenue sheltered by live oaks and Spanish moss leads to the tabby ruins of Wormsloe, the colonial estate of Noble Jones (1702–1775). Jones was a humble carpenter who arrived in Georgia in 1733 with James Oglethorpe and the first group of settlers from England.
If you enjoy seeing Live Oak trees, make sure to visit this beautiful place. Wormsloe occupies the southern portion of the Isle of Hope, a peninsula four miles long and as much as a mile wide near Savannah Ga.
The name live oak came from the fact that they remain green and “alive” throughout the winter when other oak trees are dormant and leafless.
While many species of oak trees are found throughout the world’s temperate zones, live oaks are native only from Virginia south to Florida and west to central Texas, especially thriving in the heat and humidity.
Mixture of Unexpected Colors from nature to man made. We are camping at a spot in Georgia that has a mixture of color during this month of December. This little bug landed on a board that was covered with raindrops. I do not know what kind of bug it is, but I found the colors to be interesting with its orange stripes and red legs.
This rv campground is also a mixture of trailer houses and spots for your rv. But they made it very colorful by painting all the trailer homes bright colors. Definitely a southern feel to it. We are in the midst of the cold weather down here in Georgia as well as all over the country.
Rhythmic Sounds of Steam Engine, video below. The steam locomotives have a rhythmic sound as they sit idling at a station as this one does below, the #81 in Ely Nevada. I marvel at the engineering of such things as this.
You can see the video by visiting my home page. The videos don’t show up in reader just to let you know.
May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
I heard this song the other day by Alan Jackson, I found the lyrics to be very fitting.
The older I get The more I think You only get a minute, better live while you’re in it ‘Cause it’s gone in a blink And the older I get The truer it is It’s the people you love, not the money and stuff That makes you rich (video below)The Older I Get Video Here
The older I get The longer I pray I don’t know why, I guess that I’ve Got more to say And the older I get The more thankful I feel For the life I’ve had and all the life I’m living still
The Back Roads in Nevada, we did a lot of exploring when we were camping in Nevada last winter. Every corner we turned was a surprising new landscape to see, something most unexpected at times.
We headed out one morning from the little town of Pioche and saw mountains off in the distance. As the drive started it was flat barren land and not much to look at.
We drove to the base of Horse thief Mountain and as we turned around the last bend these beautiful rock cliffs were surrounding us on all sides.
This part of Nevada has lots of natural springs where water is coming out of the ground on its own and flowing down some of the dirt roads. As you can see here we were driving the back country as fresh water just flowed down the road.
We also came across some old gold mines off on some of these roads, I looked it up and Nevada still has nearly 180,000 active mines. We will be visiting this area again one day.
Here in Georgia cotton is being harvested and baled up. Plus it is Pecan harvest time here as well.
Georgia ranked 2nd in the U.S. in cotton planted acres and 4th in number of bales produced. ● Cotton is the most widely grown row crop in Georgia. ● Georgia had 1.29 million cotton acres planted and produced an average yield of 675 lb/A. ● Georgia produced 1.8 million bales of cotton. ● Market value of production reached $406.08 million in.
Texas is the #1 producer of cotton, about 40% of the product grown there.
We camped at a spot here in Georgia where the owner had dozens of pecan trees around the campground. They had already been harvested but there were still hundreds of them on the ground and he said we can have all we wanted of those. So we picked a grocery bag full of them to take with us. They are so good.
This campground is near Glenville Georgia and if you are ever in that area they have a pecan factory right in town where folks can sell there pecans no matter what size bag you bring in, they will buy them. But they also roast them here and cover them with chocolate, Carmel. You name it they make it and sell it at a little store in front of the factory.
This is a cotton ball, when it is ripe it splits open and the cotton emerges.
South for the Winter, we are still finding areas with green leaves on them here in December. This was one of our campsites down in southern Illinois last month.
We have made it far enough south to see the moss hanging on the most beautiful trees called live oak trees.
Along with it is harvest season for two things here in the south. Can you guess what this is below? I will post it tomorrow.
The Lone Wolf Print I talked about this a few post back, about how you can refurbish some of your photos that may not turn out that well, into digital paintings if you want to save them.
This is the original photo below and it is a photo of a wolf in a nature park that I took. Oh, I only make paintings from photos that I have taken, it means a lot more to me as I create a piece of art work.
But this photo is not that good, the lighting was bad, but he is in his natural environment of lots of trees and thick brush. But I did like his expression, how he is looking at something in the grass. Then it comes down to changing the background and adding textures with the help of photoshop.
Now art work is an acquired taste of what each individual likes. For example, I have been to a few art galleries of famous painters with art exhibits of paintings I just don’t get. Like this photo I copied off of the internet of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. It is wonderful art, with colors and movement. I can appreciate it for sure and it is done by hand not on a computer. Much more work involved at a level that I cannot create at all.
What is This? What does it look like to you. It reminds me of sponge candy or thick marshmallows. It looks very creamy to me but it is nothing close to that actually.
It is Tuff and Tuffaceous
It is one of the largest geologic formations within Spring Valley, located in Nevada, it is volcanic tuff and tuffaceous sediment of Tertiary age.
Rock that contains greater than 75% ash is considered tuff, while rock containing 25% to 75% ash is described as tuffaceous (for example, tuffaceous sandstone). Tuff composed of sandy volcanic material can be referred to as volcanic sandstone.
Located near the town of Pioche in Nevada, we just happened to go for a drive and ended up here. What a beautiful place. It is loaded with natural springs all through out this valley. Hot in the summers and very cold in the winter.
The Mocking Bird, I am not sure how they came up with this name. Except the fact this bird here is in a small tree outside of our camper every morning. I don’t always think to look in the tree when I take my dogs outside in the morning, but when I get to close this tree, it lets out a shriek of a sound that makes me jump every time.
I believe this tree is hers and she doesn’t like me getting to close, maybe just with the dogs. I took my camera out and stood right under her and took these photos and it kind of looks like she is eyeballing me.
Print Your Photos, as you may realize, I take a lot of photos, I mean a lot. But what do I do with all these photos you might ask. Well, besides sharing them with all of you here on blogging, I do sell photos across the internet on different websites.
Adobe photos is a great place to sell photos and a lot of my art work I create as well. Sometimes the photos go for less then a dollar and sometimes I get surprised when one sells for much more than a dollar. That is part of the fun, seeing the sales pop up.
But I don’t just put photos on the web, I do like to print some of my own to hang on the wall to be enjoyed by us everyday without having to look at the computer.
I print mine at the store called Walgreens, they do a very nice job and pretty cheap, I print some to go in frames but like this one below I printed it to a 30×17 and stuck it to a print board you can buy at any craft store. I hung this one in our RV.
My image sizes to print on average is 5500×3800 pixels with resolution of 300 px. For larger prints I use 6000 x 4145. There is an entire mathematical formula when trying to decide how to print your photos from the web. For example;
How to calculate image size – Quick summary
And that’s really all there is to it! To figure out the image size, just follow these simple steps:
1. Multiply the width and height of the image, in pixels, to get the total pixel count. 2. Multiply the total pixel count by 3 to get the image size in bytes. 3. Divide the number of bytes by 1024 to get the image size in kilobytes. 4. Divide the number of kilobytes by 1024 to get the image size in megabytes.
It can be confusing, but the new cameras take such high quality photos these days. One just has to print some out from what ever camera you have and see what results you get.
So I highly recommend everyone to print some of your own photos if you take them. Why let them just sit on the world wide web. Have fun with your photography.
Merry Christmas, there are a lot of stray cats running around this RV park we are staying at and I was out for a walk this morning and took a photo of this one here. He looked a little grumpy so I added some holiday cheer to his portrait.
Some kind folks feed all the strays here, they won’t let you get close to them but they sit still sometimes long enough for a photo.
Young Turkey Vulture, we are at a campground this weekend that has plenty of turkey vultures hanging about. Mainly because people feed the stray cats here and then these hungry birds come down from the trees and eat the left over cat food.
Nothing goes unnoticed by these birds, I even saw 3 young ones grab a empty bag of cat food off the top of a garbage can to see if there was anything left for them. Pretty smart 🙂
Update on this post, thank you to Andrew who left a comment on this post mentioning that this first photo of a turkey vulture could be a black turkey vulture and after looking it up, I agree. So I added this bird to my over all bird list bringing it up to 153 birds photographed. Thank you Andrew,
Not I nor anyone else can travel that road you are on. You must travel it by yourself to find where your heart is telling you to go.
It is not far, it is in reach. Perhaps you have been on it since the day you were born and did not know it, for the path that leads us to Him, has always been there.
We just need to follow our heart and the rest will fall into place.
On Top of Highland Peak, this was a long drive to the top of this mountain here in Nevada, narrow roads and luckily we never met another car coming from the other direction. There were a few places with snow up here, extremely windy at the top.
There is a short video below showing where I got out of the jeep and walked towards the towers there. Until I saw the signs stating warning, the warning was for high radiation. So I immediately said lets go.
This was the highest mountain we traveled on during the adventure out west. So if you want to travel to the top of Highland peak, well now you can see what is up there just incase you change your mind. The view was spectacular though.
Nevada Landscapes, I will be going back and forth with some photos that I took out west that I have not gotten to yet along with where we are traveling now. Adds a little more variety to this blog here.
This is our first time visiting the state of Nevada and I have to say I was quite impressed with the change of scenery and the diverse landscape out west has to offer.
We stopped in a little town called Pioche, a quaint old western town with lots of history in the mining field. Here is the link to the video that describes more of the town and the museums it has; Pioche Nevada Video by Sandra J
To the north is a state park called Cathedral Gorge, with an unusual landscape formed from volcanic ash that has eroded into what they call Bentonite clay spires.
This is a close up of the Bentonite clay itself, it is like hardened mud and if you tap on it, it sounds hollow inside.
Then travel to the west of Pioche and you have Highland Peak Mountain range, that we drove up to the top of one day, nearly 10,000 ft elevation. I will have a video of that coming out next week. At the top the views are fantastic but it also had radio towers all over the top with high voltage signs everywhere. We did not stay long as there was cables and wires everywhere.
I guess not to many people go all the way to the top, the road was only a service maintenance road and I probably would not go up there twice. But I am glad I took a couple of photos to remember the view.
Sunrise on Ohio River, I arrived early enough to view the blue hour today during sunrise on the river as the lights shined across the calm water from a dredger doing its work.
In a more general sense, a ship equipped with an excavation tool that is capable of weeding off depositions such as sand, gravel, sediments, etc. from the seabed is referred to as a dredger ship or more commonly just a dredger.
Dredgers are of great importance, as they serve the purpose of ensuring the necessary safe bottom clearance for safer voyages and it added a little extra to this sunrise photo today.
Tug Boats and Barges on the Ohio River, we were camping by the Ohio river as we are heading south again, one of our favorite places in Metropolis Illinois.
The tug boats are still running on this river in November where as I heard that the mighty Mississippi river is drying up in some places farther south where the barges are sitting still because there is not enough water to go down stream.
This barge here is loaded with coal and moves down every morning at sunrise.
Earth Speaks to Us, Flowers are the earth’s endless effort to speak to us of the beauty that surrounds us everyday. To grab our attention with bright colors and unique designs. To remind us that creation is a wonderous thing.
