Road Trip: Texas to Washington

[KevinBarrett]

My wife and I are moving from Fort Worth, Texas to Seattle, Washington. What's more, we're making the trip with our two little Mazdas, and stopping to see the sights along the way. Here are a few selections from our journey so far. I'm shooting mostly with the Cyber-Shot HX9V as it is a much more handy camera in the cabin of an MX-5 roadster. With just the netbook for sorting and uploading, none of the pictures have gone through any kind of post-processing. Here goes:


Packing up our things in a U-Haul trailer. The Protege5 is pulling this burden.


Indulging in some photo-ops that I never stopped for before in all my Texas road-tripping. That's my little car with it's curious luggage solution bungeed onto the trunk rack.


Our caravan of curiously laden cars. Can you see our cat in the wagon?

[
More 'how-to's for road-tripping. Take the funnest car that will still carry what you need, get on the access roads often, and catch plenty of local flavor.

That's it for Texas! Next up will be some New Mexico scenery.

[sury]

Wishing you safe travel, Kevin. I loved the last one. Looking forward to your travel "photoblog".

Sury

[Almazar80]

Good luck with the move and looking forward to more pics.

[Birma]

Hope the move goes well KB

Love the travel photo-blog so far - great transport solutions

[mikeriach]

I hope they're not using the buckled tank to store anything hazardous!

Best of luck with the move, we only broke 1 small item last time we moved which I thought was quite a success.

Mike

[Greg Beetham]

Seattle? That’s going to be a bit of a climate change KB, I think it gets a little frosty there on occasion, (well anything below 10°C = below zero on my scale). Yep I can see the cat but it looks much larger than a cat for some reason, could be in for some exciting times there, in my experience cats don’t do cars and travel very well, they tend too get a little tense if they haven’t been accustomed to it before.
Greg

[KevinBarrett]

Okay, my bad, the cat is not actually visible in that image, but here he is exploring some New Mexico shrub, or rather, getting terrified by it:


And speaking of terrified, these cattle were none to pleased when I approached them for a golden-hour photo op:


Continuing in the theme of shyness, I caught this rocky outcropping peaking out from behind some rolling grassy hills--it reminded me of a sail on the edge of the sea:

[aster]

Hi Kevin, : )

First of all, have a safe and photogenic journey. A wonderful On-The Road photoopportunity indeed.
Second of all, I'll miss Kevin+John's combined outings that were so fruitful with photography and personal experience.
Third of all, I like Seattle and its urban arcitecture, so we'll probably be getting lots of wonderful Seattle night shots. : )
Fourth of all, hopefully once settled there, we'll see many nice winterscapes of Seattle as you ride thorough the city.
Fifth of all, nice cat but how did you take that photo? Lowering the camera in hand or by placing on the barren ground? Nicely framed with a neat glare onthe upper left corner. : )

Last of all for now, you all take care and enjoy the drive through the big distance and the vast piece of land. : ))


Yildiz

[KevinBarrett]

The voyage continues, though I am behind by a couple of states. I last left you in New Mexico, now I am in Idaho. This post will cover Colorado and Utah, though I'm skipping a lot of pictures to take you that far.

Here we are at Mesa Verde:


Our tour group gathering around a Pueblo kiva in Mesa Verde's Cliff Palace.


Elise and I are on more or less parallel roadtrips in separate cars, so I have to find subjects for some photo ops without her. Here's my ride at the Wilson Arch in Utah:


And here's a panorama at a pull out in the north of Utah. There are two train tracks running parallel to the river where they can, and carving through the mountain leg where they can't:

[KevinBarrett]

I should have more pictures up from this trip, but around this time I started using the a700 more and the HX9V less, and I haven't been able to do anything with the RAW files on the road.

[Dr. Harout]

Don't rush up things. We can wait for better processing of the a700 shots.

[Birma]

Love that pano shot KB

How's the cat getting on? When do you get to swap cars

[KevinBarrett]

After Shoshone Falls, the cat (Erasmus, or "Raz" for short) moved into the MX-5 with me, and he seems to like it. In cooler times he'll ride up in the back in the area where the top would fold down, and in warmer weather he rides in the passenger side floorboard under the A/C vent. When it get dark out he starts prowling around the cabin, sitting up on my camera bag to watch all the distant lights move around outside, or else flopping from his perch behind me out onto my shoulder to stare out my window. When we got into Yakima tonight, and the fields were all fertilized, he was so upset by the smells that he tried to find a way out of the car through the gauge cluster. When that didn't work, he tried to play it off like he was just trying to lay over the steering wheel the whole time. I was doing 70mph.

[KevinBarrett]

Shoshone Falls was pretty dried up at the time we got to see it. Here's a sweep-panorama from the little HX9V:


It was chilly:


And then it was hot:


From Twin Falls we headed up to the Sawtooth mountains and took a family picture at the top of one of the passes. Off screen left is an older British couple laughing at us:

[Juanito200]

This is a lovely travelogue you are giving us Kevin. Of course, I am sad that this now makes it a bit harder to meet for photographic adventures, I'm glad to see that you and Elise are able to enjoy the journey to your new city. Please keep the photos coming! John