Some honeymoon pics....

I made a photo book from the honeymoon, and I'm posting a link to at least some of it, I think you can see the first 15 pages. I'm not, by the way, asking you to buy a copy. I just wanted to share.

2851 Miles by Matt & Amy Kindall | Make Your Own Book

Yellowstone

Yellowstone smells like farts. I don't mean like a little bit,
I mean like gagging, awful fart smell. It's funny that they never
mention the smell of this place in any of the brochures, but I
saw nothing warning me. Don't get me wrong, it's lovely, vast,
mysterious and awe inspiring, but it's also farty.
We crossed the continental divide yesterday, and pushed
on toward the north end of the park, stopping at Old
Faithful. We waited for Faithful for 55 minutes,
45 of which we were able to see Grand geyser in the
background going off endlessly. We sat, waiting for Faithful
and watching Grand, thinking no sooner would we pick up
to walk to the other one it would stop. So, we waited for Old Faithful,
and it was.....Faithful-y?

Day 4 - Tetons!

First, let me say that Jackson Wyoming sucks.
This simple fact is unfortunate, as Jackson is the town
that borders Grand Teton N.P. Jackson is a town full of
Range Rovers, "cowboys" that are all hat and no cattle,
and restaurants that are waaaaay too expensive given they
in the middle of nowhere. Where are the greasy spoon diners
and cool little stores to shop?
However, if like us, you were mildly sickened by the town,
you can leave and find these beautiful mountains.
We woke up Tuesday morning - an hour later than
we wanted to thanks to no alarm clock in the world's
worst hotel room, and a dead cell phone battery - and
headed out of town in search of a sunrise picture. We stumbled
on this little half frozen creek (it was 21 degrees), and shot the
hell out of the mountains. I can't tell you the shear beauty and scale
of these things, they are truly stunning.

Day 3 - Idaho/Wyoming

Two from the desert in Idaho. Nothing like driving
at 90 miles per hour on a perfectly straight
desert road and listening to Joshua Tree by U2. It
had to be done, and it was. Both of these shots are from
Idaho, on the east side, with the Tetons in the background.

Day 2 - Craters of the Moon

After driving in the dark until 11:00 through the desert,
we came upon the Craters of the Moon monument, which
is not technically on the moon, but is very cool. We were tired
and miles from the nearest town, so we crashed out
in the car. I wish it hadn't been so cold, I would have
gotten a picture of the Milky Way, which was clearly
visible from the car. We woke up with the sunrise this morning
and checked out the monument. Not bad, very desolate, very
quiet. Unfortunately it doesn't translate too well on camera, but
certainly worth a visit if you are near.

Leaving Oregon

I can't really remember exactly where this
is, but it was somewhere in the far eastern side
of Oregon. It was a nice parting shot of the clouds
and rain. As we left Portland The world decided it
was not the best time for us to go and poured down
rain on us for the four hour drive to Hermiston. We
woke up to more rain in the morning, but it pretty much
slacked off by Idaho. After an all too brief visit with
my uncle Dave and aunt Meegan ("Hi Jerry!"), we were
toward Wyoming.

Another from the cabin, this time looking the other way.

Woke up to light coming through the windows, tired from
being up late the night before shooting the shot below.
Sat up in bed and looked out at the coming sunrise. From the
deck around the cabin you can see somewhere around
ten mountains. I can't tell you how amazing it was to watch
this happen in front of us. I'm not a spiritual man, but
holy hell, man. Ten minutes after this was shot, the sun was
up, the light was blah, and the magic was gone. Has it ever
occurred to you, the reader, that this light is above us for
most of the day, but since we are at the wrong angle to it,
we don't see it. Craziness.

A night in the woods.....

Shot in total darkness, about a 35 minute long exposure. This
has become one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken, I
was so jazzed when I saw this on the screen of my camera.
Shooting this required about 20 minutes of setup, 35 minutes
of shooting time, and another 30 minutes for the camera to reduce
noise and process the shot. Whew.

Um.....hi!

Well, it's been 15 months or so since I published anything here, so I fully realize no one may ever read this. I'm going to try to publish some recent shots, as well as update when possible when Amy and I are on The Road Trip To End All Road Trips. We are (thank god) gonna be out of range for most of it, but I'll do what I can. If you don't like it, maybe you should write your own blog. Yeah, not so easy, is it?

Fun with the Slip N' Slide

Bubba being Bubba. It took three grueling days of sliding to get the hang of this extremely complicated device, but they did it. Anna never did quite get the hang of it, though. She ended up sort of shimmy/crawling down it like a G.I. in boot camp.

Oregon Caves

Included in our roadtrip was the Oregon Caves monument. Forgive me for the grainy and sort of fuzzy pictures. They don't allow tripods in there so you have to hand hold the shots, which is kinda hard in the dark. Either way, we had fun for almost two hours in the dark, it was a lovely 44 degrees in there on a 95 degree day.

From the redwood forest......

Once again Butterfield and I decided we needed to get out of town this weekend, and "town" just wasn't enough. We had to get out of state, so we went down to California to check out the redoods. We ended up doing about 150 miles down the southern Oregon coast, then the redwoods, the Oregon Caves and the House of Mystery (which was pretty unmysterious, if you ask me but I love a tourist trap). It was a fun-filled 900 mile trip to escape the heat in Portland and next time I need to bring my kids. 15 hours in the car. Yeah.

Paul could talk to the rubes via either a camera or just some dude hidden in the woods. He would make people laugh uncomfortably as he described what they were wearing or what they looked like. He would then wave or wink at the women and children. Only kinda creepy.

The first really big tree we came across. This is literally ten feet from the road, my tripod is in the breakdown lane to shoot this.

And some more....

This is called the Corkscrew Tree. I'm not quite sure how many trees are involved here, but they are all sort of swirling around each other.




















Gotta do the tourist thing, right?






















The little pink dot at the bottom of the tree is Amy, added for scale. This is called Big Tree. I know, right? So much imagination went into the naming of these trees. This bad boy is 300 feet tall, 21 feet wide and about 1500 years old.

New Bubba

Back in April, Anna decided to take her new hat and run out into the yard. I decided to follow. These were just Anna being Anna.