Roaring Along

We ditched our plans to hike in Greenbrier this morning when Wayne's back was spasming too much for that to be an option.  I'm all for hiking alone, but I sure don't want to spend the first morning of our long awaited trip apart!

Since traffic was non-existent in Greenbrier we decided to brave downtown Gatlinburg and make our way over to the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail.  The traffic wasn't too bad late morning on a Sunday, definitely better than the afternoon before.  Last time we drove the nature trail was in the spring of 2012, so it was nice to compare how it looked in different seasons.  Check out my archives if you haven't seen my images, we were there in April.  For some reason I'm not able to perform the link function on Blogger when I use Wayne's laptop.

While fall here is nice and I'm hoping it will get better, I already have the next 3 fall color trips mapped out.  The next 2 will just be long weekends in the U.P and Bayfield, Wisconsin because we have 2 really big trips planned for 2014 and 2015 at other times of the year.  But in 2016 it's eastward bound, baby!  I've never seen New England in the fall, have you?

I was taking pictures of the water and looked up to see Wayne taking shots of me.  Sneaky!

I rented a 70-200mm zoom from lensrental.com for the next week, but it's really too much lens for all this close work in the woods.  But dig the clarity!



All my other shots are with the kit lens that came with the camera.  You could hear the difference in the shutter speed whenever I changed the lenses due to working in the shade, but what are ya gonna do?   Good lens was too much zoom in tight area, mediocre lens...mediocre!  Wherever there wasn't shade there was too much light.  No real cure for that, right?  Cursed midday!



Barn and corn crib on Jim Bales Place

  

Alex Cole cabin on Jim Bales farm along Roaring Fork





Gorillapod shot of the two of us not the best, looks like either it focused on the cabin or we moved or both.  There were a few ladies out and about with dressy saris (?) on today, they were so colorful I think it confused the one swallowtail butterfly who was lazily floating around the clearing.

Wayne had to stand over the butterfly to make some shade for the shot to turn out.  Don't know the story with butterflies but it should have been much more skittish so at the end of its life cycle maybe? 

Wayne thought he was pretty funny when he lifted up his little point and shoot and tried to catch me getting gear out of the bag on his back.  I accused him of being high off all the Vicodin.

I took some shots down at Regan's Mill too, but I'll save those for later.  By the time we leave here I'll have so many photos I'll probably be posting about the Smokies until Thanksgiving!  But here's one more for today's post of me at my new blogging workstation away from home.  A fire, a cup of coffee and a view of the creek out the window.  And the day is only half over!  Love it!