Welcome to Smith Rock State Park

Those of you that live in or around this state that do not travel within it are doing yourself a grave disservice. Man, do I sound like a world traveling douche or what?!? Either way, get in your car and get the fuck outta Dodge, man. I suppose if I lived in Iowa I would say mostly the same things, but I'm tellin' you, we live in a beautiful place, you and me.

Ugly stuff from over there

Forgive me if you aren't into broken down old buildings, but I am. I love seeing first hand what time does to things, what happens when nothing happens to something and it is left to sit.

And some pretty things....

Larz Anderson Park, right by Jeremy's house. Lovely place, and the goose poo is plentiful.

And wonderful little Lila. Didn't get one of Hannah, she was sick the whole time, so I will add one from the last trip.

Danvers, back in Taxichussets

The woods, outside what was formerly known as Danvers State Hospital. As seen by countless loonies on their evening walks.
All that is left of the former building. Though it looks big, look it up, it used to be ginormous.
The facade, as seen through the ugly new condos that have been built onsite. These children are playing football on the same grass that criminal crazies once possibly got tackled as they tried to escape the lobotomy horrors that waited within. Silly.

Bennington, Vermont

Wikipedia says: "The Battle of Bennington was a battle of the American Revolutionary War, taking place on August 16, 1777, in Walloomsac, New York, about 10 miles away from its namesake Bennington, Vermont.[1] An American force of 2,000 New Hampshire and Massachusetts militiamen, led by General John Stark with aid from Colonel Seth Warner, along with elements of Vermont's Green Mountain Boys, defeated a combined force of 1,250 dismounted Brunswick dragoons, Canadians, Loyalists, and Native Americans led by Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Baum that British General John Burgoyne was attempting to push through the northern Hudson River Valley." I don't know, it just seems silly to build a 300 foot tall.....thing to celibrate a battlein which you won when the odds were nearly 2 -1. View is nice from up here though.













For $2.00, Benny Bourgeois will take you up to the top of this bad boy and you will see three (count 'em, three) states. It lies in Vermont at the southwest corner, so one direction is New York, one is Massachusetts, and the other two are (wait for it) Vermont. Benny Bourgeois, just in case you missed that name the first time.

Troy, New York

This is, hands down, the best sign I have ever seen.
















They don't have old cars over there, they rust, see? Stupid salt.





















Best I can tell, this is a little river that comes from Burdens Pond and runs into the Hudson River. Taken right from the side of the road in Troy.

A few more..

Mystic River, in, um, Connecticut? You know, made famous by that movie about pizza? With the girl with the big teeth?
They got some pretty buildings in the northeast.

We live in a nice state.

So once again we got in the car and headed out to the great wide east (ern Oregon, that is). I found a heavily photoshopped picture of the church you can see here and decided I needed to see it in person. All I could find out about it was it is in Sherman county which is highway 97 south of Biggs. So Amy and myself, being the brave sojourners we are we sought about finding it. We wandered about in sunny Sherman county for an hour or so before asking a group of what seemed to be religious "freaks" that were raking the lawn of a church. The nice old woman sent me on what we thought was a wild goose chase that put us right back into town. Intent on giving the old bag the collective finger, we instead decided to stop at the corner store in Moro (pop. 337) where we saw a po-leeees car. Inside I showed a picture of the church on my fancy futuristic phone to the copper, and serprise serprise serprise! he knew exactly where it was. Long story short (too late) we found it, having sat still and untouched for 94 years. No grafitti, no vandalism, just sitting.
After the cop told us how to find the church, he told me of a road you will find if you take a left right before a right(?), a road you will not find on Google maps (I tried) a road that is about 15 miles long, all gravel and follows the Deschutes River gorge overlooking the sunset if you happen to be there at the right time of day. If you were to just turn around and look a bit to the north, you will see the next picture down, overlooking Mt. Adams and the Columbia River gorge. We were on this road, sitting on the side taking pictures for maybe upwards of half an hour and no one, not ONE person or other bit of human life came by.
As I was setting up for this shot a little group of what I say were deer, Amy is sure it was kangaroos because of the hopping, went bounding by but they just wouldn't wait for me to get the camera out. Damn you nature! Damn you to hell!

















I don't know what to say about this one, just a little abandoned house that caused me to screech off of Hwy 97 and grab the tripod.