Sunday, October 12, 2008

Oct 12 - Leaving for Paris - Astoria to Portland

This is still Astoria, stopping at Safeway on the way out of town. Here's one of the orange ships I love so much, and the covered tram stop across the tracks from the Safeway parking lot. The ship looks redder than in real life because digital color sometimes bumps the red. I see I didn't frame it too well - I'd like to have had the ship lower in the pic in relation to the roof of the tram stop. I take so many pix on the fly. One of my next goals will be to pay more attention to framing and to actually STOP when I take more of my photos. But it wasn't the case with most of the shots on this trip. I took many-many photos, and a lot of them were seriously on the fly - actually while moving or having stopped for a second. No matter, I'd rather have them than not.

We stopped at Michaels to buy art supplies for Lee, who was going on to India after our week in Paris. In fact, that's how the Paris trip came about. A group that he draws with at the college in Bend invited him on a drawing/painting trip to India. Since the flight stopped in Europe at one of several cities he could choose from, he thought, "Why waste a good stop?" When he asked whether I wanted to spend that week in Europe before his trip, how much of a brain did I need to say "Duh!" So we chose Paris.

Michaels had pumpkins on display, and some of them were white. I've never been so exhausted (for a number of reasons) before a trip like this, and it really showed when I thought for a minute that they were REAL. I was thinking, "Wow, that's incredible. I've never seen white pumpkins."

We got a room at the Holiday Inn Express near the airport with a wonderful jacuzzi tub. Was that great! We were both so exhausted and a bit stressed out, and it was the perfect way to relax. The welcoming white swan in the tub is a folded towel, which I liked a lot. The swan in the bed is Lee falling asleep at about 7 pm. I had to wake him up when I ran the bath water, because I wasn't going to miss out on this great tub! Oddly, one of the only live animals I photographed on this trip was a black swan at the zoo in Paris.

No comments: