Heading home from fall trip, 2012

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Dear Friends --

These are photos taken during our drive back home in mid-October. The first photos are of the Saturn IB rocket in Huntsville, Alabama where it was built. The next photos were taken at the Little River Canyon National Preserve located on top of Lookout Mountain in Alabama. Next we visited my cousin Lyn, her husband Brooks, and Sylvester the Cat at their farm in Kentucky. The last photos are of Rainbow Springs where we spent our last night. Several years ago Bob and I kayaked into the town of Dunnellon from the campground, had lunch, then kayaked back, about a three hour trek. At that time the springs were almost crystal clear from the source to the town and so beautiful. They're still beautiful, just not quite as clear. And this is the end of our big 2012 fall trip.

We've been sending out photo blogs of the places we've visited for around 8 years, starting four years after we begin our travels, and that amounts to well over 1000 photos if you've been with us from the beginning. That's over 1000 photos of this incredibly beautiful and fascinating continent we live on. And this is my pitch. Please consider getting into something with wheels and go out there and experience some of these places we've been sending you pictures of -- first hand.

You can look at these photos, but you're still missing the whole big experience: the smells and sounds and dimensionality and all the people and animals and goings on mixed in with it, all the richness of the reality. You can stay in a tent (almost everywhere we stay has space for tents), or motels, or rent / buy a travel trailer. Some new ones on the market are quite small these days like the "teardrops" from decades ago.

We've been doing this for 12 years and now want to do even more each year. But that's us.

Just a thought.

In about three weeks I'll be sending some photos of the "Trail of Lights" in Arkanas where we plan to spend Christmas because it's going to be cold there (we hope) and we were imprinted like little ducklings with cold weather for Christmas.

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Photos

Saturn IB Rocket
1 of 3 launch vehicles in the Saturn family of rockets developed in Huntsville, Alabama.

Canadian geese roaming around
I took this in Niagara Falls, Canadian side