More Road Trip Photos - June 2016

Bridge abutment

I am sorry that the photos are allover the place rather than inline.  The blog is giving me a hard time about positioning the pictures when I spend a long time writing a post.  I could not get the pictures to go where I wanted so I just kept adding pictures that might not have been put on the blog.

I have been working on the soft sculpture lamb project, but at this point I don't have any new photos.  I have done a fair amount of work on the torso of the lamb. Knotting in one strand of wool at a time is a very time consuming process.  It will be a few days yet before the project is completed.

Drawbridge.

Tunnel under a mountain.

For today, I am posting a few more pictures from my recent road trip.  It is hard to say what will catch my eye.  One of the things that turned out to be the focus of this trip was infrastructure.  As I blogged last time, it is absolutely awe inspiring to get out and actually see the things that make our country work.  We take our good fortune for granted so often.  It is easy to forget that much of what we have today is due to the work and effort of so many people.  For example, we go to the grocery store and pick up an orange without a second thought about how it arrived there.  Oranges don't grow just anywhere.  Most of them are shipped to us.  Someone had to grow the oranges, pick the oranges, clean, and sort them.  By one means or another the oranges were shipped to us: truck, plane, or train.  People had to mine the ores and build the means of transportation:  the highways, rails, or airports that allowed the orange to be brought to us.  Someone had to receive the oranges, get them to their respective stores, and put them out for you to buy.  All of this is completely out of sight and out of mind.  If you could follow any product from start to finish, you would be amazed at how many people are involved in delivering that product to you.

Barge in a shallow inlet.

There are many things that are falling away.  The past is disappearing right before our eyes and most of the time we don't even notice it.  Last time I blogged, I mentioned that I had noticed that a lot older churches no longer had their steeples and that many of the newer churches are not building steeples onto their churches.  Steeples are disappearing from the landscape.  Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of steeples, but they are disappearing from view.  One day in the future, we may turn around to find that they are all gone.  In another blog a year or so ago, I had also blogged that the old white farm houses with tin roofs were also disappearing and had been replaced by new homes.  I had also blogged about hay ricks having disappeared from the landscape, being first replaced by hay bales and then by giant rolls of hay.   It just seems that things are disappearing so quickly.  Things that had been common for hundreds of years (church steeples) or even a thousand years (hay ricks) are starting to disappear or have disappeared in the course of a generation.

Marina

Well, probably no one misses hay ricks.  Forking hay by hand onto a tripod of saplings was a lot of work.  The giant bales of hay are picturesque  in the field as well.  It is just an example of the way things are changing.  Architecture is a bit different.  At one time, a building was built to be beautiful; a feast for the eye as well as functional.  Now, for the most part, architecture is all about cramming the most amount of function into the least amount of space for the lowest cost.  Much of our architecture resembles a large box.  While on one level cost efficiency is admirable, we, as a society, have lost something from the practice of removing the beautiful from our lives.

Psychic Reader office.

Infrastructure is functional for the most part, but at times, people have taken on the time and expense of also making it beautiful.  Bridges are one example of this.  Sometimes they are just a span, other times they are a span that is built to be beautiful as well as functional.

Infrastructure also decays.  Sooner or later it needs to be repaired or replaced.  But in between those times it changes.  The changes are interesting to me as well.  The changes show character and how time and weather (and also pollution) have affected the object.   It once was like this, and now it is like that.  Look around and see what is and what was before it is gone.  And for goodness sake, take a picture of it.  It will be gone sooner than you think.

Double deck bridge.

Rusting tanks.

While I am on my soap box here, I thought I would show another picture of something that is disappearing, or if not disappearing, at least out of sight for the most part.  However, in the case of psychic readers they have moved out of the country and into strip malls.  They generally use the title "Spiritual Advisor."  Years ago, there were many more fortune tellers plying their trade in buildings along the highway.  I remember seeing them along the roads out in the country.  Many of them had large signs along the road calling themselves Mother, Sister, or Reverend (insert name here).  I saw two of them along the way in Maryland.  I managed to get a photo of one as we drove by.  I used to see these all over.  Now, not so often. 

Commuter train.

Sometimes it is hard to get a photo of the interesting things I see along the road.  By the time I see it, I have to get the camera up and focused we have flashed past it already.  Along the highway, this could be at seventy miles per hour (112.654 kilometers per hour).  I don't have much time to get a photo before we are beyond it.  There are so many shots that I wish I could have taken.  I don't know if I will get a chance to get another picture of it because it may not be there if I happen to come that way again.

Check back for a new blog post on the lamb soft sculpture on Sunday.