Abstract Spires and Road Trip!

​Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

I just finished the second leg of a road trip to Oregon. My son Greg is headed to Oregon to stay with friends for a few months to see if the Pacific Northwest is to become his new home. He was planning to drive across country by himself but I offered to go with him. Friends and family who have travelled with me know that I plan everything in great detail when going on trips. This time, there is no plan other than trying to get west (to the Rockies) as fast as we can and then we will decide where else to go once we get there.

Holy Toledo - We left Connecticut on Saturday morning and ended up in Toledo, Ohio for the night after about 661 miles of driving through 4 states (Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio). We hopped in the car on Sunday morning, drove 688 miles through another 4 states (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska) and ended up in Omaha, Nebraska. As I write this, our plan is to make it to Manitou Springs, Colorado late on Monday (a mere 612 miles) and maybe stay in the Denver area for a couple of nights and try to get some rest. The weather in Oregon looks pretty awful (lots of rainy days) toward the end of the week so I don’t know where we will be after Denver. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I haven’t been to the Denver area in a while and I thought I would post this image that I took last time I was there. It is the Air Force Chapel in Colorado Springs. This image was the first HDR image that I ever processed. Looking at the original HDR image now, it has all of the problems that you would expect from a first one – over-processed, lots of ghosting, too much grunge and radioactive colors. For this version, I took one of the brackets and processed it as I normally do. Much better result this time around (although I liked the HDR version when I first processed it).

Not sure how often I will be posting the rest of the week but I will try to get a few up as we move on west.