My Epic Road Trip Part 1
Quite a bit has happened since my last blog post. My wife and I took an amazing road trip on our move from Florida back to our home-state, Oregon. We were both fortunate enough to received nursing jobs in the areas we both want to work. We always knew Florida would be a temporary living situation and that we would end up back in Oregon where our families live. We figured what better chance to take our time and stop anywhere we wanted. So, we took 7 weeks to carry this trip out. It took quite a bit of planning, time, and preparation to live a minimal lifestyle on the road for this amount of time; and for the most part, it went flawlessly! You can imagine that I spent most of my time researching the best places to take shots of all our destinations. For this research, I continue to use Google Earth and check out the Panoramico photos people have taken and geotagged. This was particularly helpful for figuring out where to shoot city skylines from because I could use the 3D feature on the buildings.
We started by having a cargo trailer built for us. But not just a metal box of a trailer, a trailer that has been semi-converted into a camper. A 6×12 ft V-nose built with extra height so that I could stand up in it (a must for a 6’2” guy), insulation, a breaker box with two 12 volt outlets, and a full sized tip out bunk – the best part! Since this would be our home for the next two months, we sold mostly everything we owned on Craig’s List – including my two favorite things: my iMac and my 50” plasma TV. The trailer was just a shell so I spent some time making the interior a bit more livable by adding shelves, a mini-fridge, a closet, carpet, even a trailer hitch receiver on the rear for our bike rack, and a generator for power when we didn’t have hookups. Not too shabby! Better than any motor home or travel trailer because this can all be totally taken down and re-customized. We lovingly named him Woody. We figured it was appropriate since we named our Grand Cherokee Jessie. So, in the event of the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse, we’ve got a bit of a head start…
The first day of our trip was a long drive across the Gulf Coast to New Orleans. It was a long drive across moist swamplands. But, the sunset was quite gorgeous.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get off the freeway in time to shoot it, so I just got this shot from the window with iPhone.
We met up with a friend we knew in high school and her partner. We did some of the typical tourist things that people do in New Orleans. Checked out the French Quarter and Bourbon Street – which was a lot trashier than I expected. I mean, I know it’s where Mardi Gras is and a party town, but there was a strip club on every block and people practically begging you to come in. Anyway, we also checked out a local bar where they had some live jazz. The bar was filled with old people in town for Jazz fest. Had some oysters, which I did not like much at all. Then, the part I had been looking forward to the most, photographed the city skyline at night.
We drove across the Mississippi to Algiers and got this shot. I loved the fast-moving clouds and I thought they gave some motion leading the eye over the bridge to downtown. For this effect, I took a 30 second shot at f8.0
After just two nights in New Orleans, we were off to our next destination – the beautiful Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas. Actually, it was just some hills, forest, and bathhouses. The most exciting thing that happened on that route was that our trailer got a flat. Luckily we discovered the puncture not long after it had occurred and Siri provided us with a tire shop within minutes where some genuine hillbillies got us back in the road in no time. Just one night was spent in Hot Springs, wasn’t really much to see beyond a day! It was a nice sunset, but we couldn’t get to a spot free of trees to photograph it. The next morning we took a trail from the campground to the spring, which is just a bunch of bathhouses. There was a fountain and faucet where people could fill up jugs of spring water. Apparently some people swear by it…but after seeing the corrosion it had caused to the fountain we weren’t too interested in drinking it.
After Hot Springs it was on to Dallas and my Aunt’s house. It was awesome to catch up with family we hadn’t seen in many years and to have a home cooked meal! Although, this Tex Mex restaurant we went to was amazing. Dallas was nice, everything was very clean and shiny. We checked out the place JFK was shot. Thought it was kind of odd that they had Xs marking the spots in the street where he had been shot. For the skyline, I had planned to go out on this bridge, but it was closed for construction! So, I hopped the bridge to a grassy hill overlooking the Trinity River.
All the lights really made for a bright foreground. However, I wanted the sky to look a little brighter too which I accomplished through post-processing.
After two nights in Dallas, we continued through Texas to San Antonio. This three hour drive turned into an all day event after the Jeep broke down. She overheated and the steering locked up. Luckily, we were able to exit off the freeway before shutting her off. After popping the hood and investigating, we opted to just let her cool off thinking the heat and running the A/C was just too much while towing. But, after she had cooled down the same thing happened after just a couple hundred yards. This time when I popped the hood, it was obvious a belt had been ripped up as there were pieces of it all over the engine. Given the warranty, we had to have Jessie and Woody towed to the nearest dealership. Unfortunately, since it was Saturday, the dealership in San Antonio was closed – along with every rental car agency in San Antonio aside from the airport! So, we had to take a cab to the airport where we picked up a Toyota Yaris. We hated that car…but we sure tried to make the most of it and carried on with our plans for San Antonio. So, that evening, we took the dogs down to the River Walk in downtown and explored the area.
This was easily one of the most popular destinations in San Antonio. The walkways along this canal-like river were jammed with people. It was a unique thing to find in the middle of downtown. This river winded a loop around several blocks of the city lined with bars, restaurants, and hotels.
The next day was spent at one of the most popular water parks in the country, the Schlitterbah in New Braunfels! This was a must from my wife. They had some very unique rides including some uphill water coasters that used high powered water jets to shove tube and riders up. There were also several tubing shoots that used spring water along a man-made channel that ran downhill. We enjoyed our day here. Monday, after talking with the dealership, we found out our tensioner had apparently failed causing the belt to rip – which sliced the radiator hose. So, we had to spend another unplanned night in San Antonio waiting for their parts to be delivered. We did some chores that would normally be done at home, but become exponentially more difficult to complete logistically when on the road, such as grocery shopping and laundry. That afternoon we checked out the Alamo, another must from my wife.
Tuesday morning we finally got Jessie and Woody back and made it on our way across Texas to Big Bend National Park. Once we got off the freeway, there was just nothing. We drove for hours across the desert through a few tiny towns, by countless ranches, and endless cacti. It was still beautiful in its own way. We made it in to the park just as the sun was setting and displaying this awesome show of warm colors and tones. As I contemplated a composition since I hadn’t planned to be here for sunset and therefore did not do any research for this specific area, I veered off the road into the desert and immediately turned back as a long thorn punctured my shoe and poked the bottom of my foot! Welcome to the hostile desert! I walked down the roadway only seeing a couple cars drive by, so I opted to use it as a foreground.
This was actually a shot I had envisioned since I was a kid with my little 35mm point and shoot. We took a lot of family trips across the American Southwest and I always remembered the sun above the horizon stretching shadows in the desert landscape. This shot took quite a bit of blending. I used my typical technique and shot images at successively increasing apertures providing a bright foreground while preventing the sun from taking over the scene.
Since we arrived in the park just as the sun was setting, we ended up setting up camp in the dark. Which wasn’t a chore since Woody was so easy to make ready to sleep in! Much better than pitching a tent by flashlights! The next morning I, of course, got up early enough to shoot sunrise. We camped in the Chisos Basin, the highest campground in the park where the air was a bit cooler. So, I drove back down the road we drove up in the dark to shoot the Chisos Mountains as the morning light shone on its peaks.
The sunrise was pretty awesome. There were some nice high clouds reflecting the light. I walked off the road (trying very hard to avoid thorns this time) to find a composition that I thought was interesting. When I travel off-trail I am always very careful to avoid stepping on vegetation and, in the desert, rare cryptobiotic soil.
During our three nights camping at Big Bend National Park, during the day it was hot and cold at night. So when we weren’t sleeping, we were driving around in the Jeep utilizing the A/C to keep cool. What better way to take advantage of this than by traveling on some 4×4 trails! It was the first time we had gone 4 wheeling in the Grand Cherokee and she did not make us think twice about the ‘Trail Rated’ Badge she earned. The Quadralift air suspension which can raise her ground clearance by 10 inches was particularly helpful to avoid high rocks in the dirt road. There are dozens of miles of 4×4 trails in the park so we wasted a few hours exploring some of them.
After returning to camp for lunch, we headed out again to the Western side of the park. We drove all the way to the Rio Grande, which was apparently at a record low level. It was actually quite disappointing. The Rio Not-So Grande more like. However, we still enjoyed driving around checking out the changing landscapes as we ascended and descended the mountains. And felt the temperature fall and rise to over a 30-degree difference once we reached the river. So hot! This seemed to be a very slow time for the park as we hardly saw any other people once we left the much cooler Chisos Basin. We also seemed to have just missed the cactus blooming season for the area as a lot of the cacti had blossoms, but the blossoms were old and dead. Sunset that evening wasn’t even worth sharing a shot of, unfortunately. But, the previous night’s sunset has more than made up for that.
The next day we had grand plans of hiking through Santa Elena Canyon where the Rio Grand runs, we were going to go at sunrise to shoot the light on the canyon wall and to do some hiking before it got too hot. However, after seeing zero clouds in the sky before sunrise, we opted to sleep a bit longer and make a nice breakfast before heading out. Well, by the time we made it back down to the river it was way too hot to hike very far, let alone leave the dogs by themselves. So, I hiked a little way up the canyon wall to get some shots of the late morning light. But I ended up like this iPhone shot more! This was processed with the Camera + app.
The rest of the afternoon we didn’t feel much like doing anything. So, we hung out on the patio of the lodge in the Chisos Basin where the air was cooler and wifi was available. I practiced taking some time lapses with my new intervolometer. There were some nice puffy clouds moving across the sky which made for some interesting scenes begging to be time lapsed. An intervolomer gives a photographer the ability to program a shot to be taken at set intervals. After goofing around a bit with that, we had an early dinner so we could head out again to take some shots of sunset. On our drive out of the basin, we came across a bear just walking down the middle of the road. He was a very small, scrawny looking black bear that wasn’t bothered by us driving right next to him taking photos and a video. This shot, of course, was taken with iPhone out the window.
There were several storm clouds forming over the lower desert. The area was obviously starving for some moisture, but most of the rain seemed to evaporate before it even reached the mountains. These fast-moving storm clouds seemed liked the perfect opportunity to make my first real time lapse.
It’s not very long, but that was actually a composite of 189 shots taken every 4 seconds. I used Lightroom to combine them into a slideshow and exported them as a video set to 25 frames per second giving it the smoothness you see. Some day, I plan to make some much longer ones with music for the background. I stopped the time lapse so that I could take some stills of the increasingly awesome sky. It’s a good thing I stopped it when I did because just as I took down my tripod, a huge gust of wind came up and practically blew me over! We drove down the road a little ways and I took this shot.
This shot didn’t take any blending as I wasn’t shooting directly into the sun nor had the light faded enough to cause many dark areas in the scene. I used the cactus at the lower left of the frame as my primary foreground because I thought it looked interesting.
The next morning we were on our way once more to another Texas destination. We spent an entire week in this state and only saw a small portion of it! I will leave that portion of our trip for another post…
Dan Sherman Photography 