Washington Monument–Late Evening

In yesterday post I shown my first photo of the Washington Monument, taken back in the summer. I came back here later in the Fall, but in the evening, I wanted to see how it looks with all of those lights illuminating the place.

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Washington Monument–Middle of the Day

Over the last few years I’ve been travelling to Washington DC area fairly often. During all that time I actually didn’t take many pictures, so about 6 month ago I decided to fix this problem and take some photos of our capital.

I took photo of Washington Monument from this spot on three different occasions, every time in very different conditions. So over the next three days I’ll post each of them in chronological order and let you decide which one you like most or not. I kind of like them all, but I’m biased, you know.

The first photo was taken in the middle of the day in July. It was hot and sticky out there, we walked DC for hours, our feet burned form hot asphalt and concrete side walks. We came to this monument and decided to relax for a few minutes. We actually took our shoes off and set on steps next to the pool and put our feet in the water. Perfect way to get them in order for a few more hours of walking… I was looking at the monument and kind of liked what I saw, the picture was born.

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Bass Lake in Fall Colors

More from the Bass Lake in North Carolina. Enjoy.

After taking this photo we walked around the lake and saw a huge outer right around that yellow tree on the left. He was swimming along the shore, maybe 15-20 feet away. Pretty cool to see them in the wild.

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Fall Colors and Spare Tires

I’m going to continue for a few more days and maybe weeks (as long as supply lasts) with Fall photos. After all we are in the middle of the Fall and I like beautiful colors that it presents to us.

Yesterday we went to ride bikes on Virginia Creeper trail. The plan was to park in Damascus, take a shuttle to White Top and then ride down for 17 miles, with some stops at cool places for lunch and some photo ops. About 6 miles away from Damascus, driving on the mountain road we heard sudden noise in the rear left tire of my car, like it got popped or something, bum, bum, bum. I immediately pulled over into a small ditch to see what happened. Got out of the car and hear – shhhh, air coming from the tire and see yellow handle of a screwdriver. I pulled it out, about 6 inch old Phillips tool. “F***** Rednecks”, the only words I could manage at that time, throwing their damn tools in the middle of the road. Since we were in the ditch, not suitable for replacing the tire, we jumped back in the car and drove on deflating tire for about half a mile, down the slope, to the first available flat pad. Thankfully, the spear tire had the right pressure in it and I changed it in about 30 or so minutes. Finally, we managed to get to the bike shops in Damascus and see if we could get the shuttle. Well, popular day, all shuttles were booked for the following 2 hours. Reading the car manual we learned that it is not advisable to drive more than 50 mph on a spare tire, and it would take us an additional 1-2 hours to get back home, we could not wait that long for a shuttle. We got on the bikes and started pedaling up the trail. We did not go all the way up, maybe only about 6 miles, with a few stops for lunch and hopefully some good photos. So we did about 12 miles round trip, had a good time, got tired and slowly drove back home. Long day.

This photo is taken at the Bass lake in Blowing Rock, NC. I had to put my tripod into the lake to get the right view of the tree with little lilies in the small inlet from the lake. This one is better seen on the large screen in higher resolution. You can click on the image to get a higher resolution image from my photo gallery.

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Colorless

It seams like this Fall so far is not super colorful. Leaves turn brown and drop down to the ground. At least here in NC. As I said last week, leaves in the mountains already past their full color and many trees lost most of it, while down in the low country it is pretty much green.

Today we are going to ride bikes on Virginia Creeper Trail in Damascus. It will be 17 or so miles along the river, across many little bridges. I hope to see some Fall colors.

This photo was taken at the Bass lake in Blowing Rock, NC. Last weekend we decided to stop by and check the colors and I’m glad we did because it was almost over. It happened that last year we were here on the same weekend and it was like night and day in comparison to this year. Last year colors were so rich and gorgeous, so much better than this year. I ‘m not sure why it is, probably depends on the amount of rain we got during the summer or average temperatures, or could be something completely different.

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