Selfie

It's time once again for P.J.'s monthly photo blog challenge. The theme for this month is Selfie and although I'm very comfortable with taking selfies of myself, I'm having a hard time coming up with words to go along with each of the photos, as many of them are very similar in nature. But I will do my best to come up with enough words to cover each selfie that I took this month. And to be honest, most of them are going to center around either my granddaughter or geocaching, so be forewarned. You're either going to get excessive cuteness, or get bored reading about my favorite hobby. But it's what I have for you this month. 

1 & 2 Geocaching

This past month I went a variety of local places to find some geocaches, including a couple of virtual caches. The fact that I found a couple of virtual caches this month is actually kind of rare since I've pretty much tapped out the Southern California area of all of the possible virtual caches. 

There was a challenge cache in our area that wanted us to find 7 icons, ten each on a day. So you'd have to find 10 traditional caches on a day, then on another day, you'd have to find 10 virtual caches, or 10 multi caches. I completed that challenge years ago, but even back then I had to travel down to the San Diego area for a day of caching to get the 10 virtual caches that I needed for this challenge. So to say that I found two virtual caches this month in my local area is actually quite an achievement.

The first shot was taken near Griffith Park in Los Angeles at the L. A. Live Steamers Railroad Museum. The kicker for this particular shot is the museum is only open one day a month, the third Sunday of each month. Now why is this important? Inside the grounds is Walt Disney's old Carolwood barn which used to reside on his family's estate in the Holmby Hills area. It's the barn where he worked on all of his outdoor trains when he wasn't running them on his estate. Yes, you read that correctly. Disney was quite a train buff and he actually had a model railroad that people could ride on in his backyard. The family no longer owns the home and in fact, the barn is the only thing that remains of the house where Walt spent much of his time in the 30s and 40s thinking up, among other things, Disneyland. Since I once worked at Disneyland, I really wanted to visit this and get credit for a virtual geocache, which meant taking a selfie outside the barn.

The second shot is actually Disney related as well, because once we were done touring the museum and the Carolwood barn, we continued in the local area finding other geocaches. As we worked our way around finding caches, we ended up at the front entrance to the Walt Disney Studios which is where I took this shot. Disney Studios are located on Alameda. Myers St. is a side street almost directly across from the entrance and since that's my last name, I had to take a photo of it with me in it. For those of you interested, the geocache is located behind me in that parking lot. Can you see it?

3, 4, & 5 The Cutest Grandbaby in the Entire World

Yeah, I know I'm biased, but I really think she's wonderful. Within the last 6 months or so, we've started an almost daily tradition where my daughter or son-in-law will call us up at dinner time on FaceTime and we'll eat dinner with them, but 300 miles away. During the middle of last month, we didn't get to do that every often since they were on the east coast visiting her other set of grandparents. But I knew our time was coming since she was going to be spending over a week down here while my daughter went through some teacher training classes on-line and then had some bridal things to do because her friend is getting married next month.

We were the designated baby sitters and I'll take that job any day of the week. Last time they were down here, I got a really cute photo of her with my wife's two stuffed Pooh Bears plus her stuffed Pooh Bear. I called it the Council of Poohs and it looked like she was directing a major meeting between all of the Pooh Bears. I tried to get something like that this time, but it never worked out right. I did, however, get a couple of shots of her Pooh Bear in with the selfies as you can plainly see.

The second day they were there, she was fighting her nap and had a partial meltdown. We started to softly sing a round with her and I'm not sure if it was the singing or the vibration of my low voice, but eventually she drifted off clutching her Papa and her Pooh Bear. Nothing, I can tell you from firsthand experience, beats having a small child fall asleep on you, even if you are stuck in that position for several hours afterwards. It's worth it. 

One of the things we discovered while she was down here this time was that she loves to look at photos of herself. The second shot of her with Pooh Bear and me is of us sitting in front of my computer looking through our photo album of all of the shots we've been sent since she was born. This is one the absolute best benefits of photography these days. You don't have to worry about the price of the film since there isn't any. Take as many photos as you want and then cull them later. Or perhaps you won't cull them since they're all so great, because they're photos of your kids and your grandkid. 

I can tell you that she'd sit in my lap for hours if she wanted to see photos and eventually, she'd drift off to sleep for a nice nap if we needed it. This only backfired one time because she was right on the edge one day and I went through the photos and we got to a photo of her and her mom. Oops. That backfired spectacularly at that point because all she wanted was Mama from then on. Hey, you live and learn.

And finally, as I was looking over all of the shots I'd taken this past month, I realized that I only had four good selfies, and it's the 31st of July and it's already evening. Now I suppose I could fudge it and just take another selfie of myself with my grand daughter in the morning since they were leaving then, but then it wouldn't make the challenge parameters. Yeah, my OCD is kicking in here but there are certain principles at work here and I want this to be an honest challenge. So what's a Papa to do? Get a photo of her after she's taken a bath. She's nice and relaxed and happy and it worked out rather well. 

And so we have this last shot. I'm not sure what it is about this shot, but she really does look very relaxed. Maybe she was tired and would soon be dreaming in bed, or maybe the warm water of the bath just really relaxed her. If that's the case, then when she grows up, she really needs to get herself a hot tub.

And there you have it - my five photos for P.J.'s photo challenge theme of Selfie. Once again, please feel free to stop by the link and see what other bloggers have done with their selfies. Please leave comments below. I read each one and try to respond to all of them as soon as they get published on the blog. 

On a side note, if you do comment on something, I have to manually approve each comment. I was having a problem with spammers just randomly coming on my blog and blasting it with all sorts of junk comments and advertisements and so I changed the settings to moderator approval needed. So if it feels like your comment didn't come through, it probably did, it's just that I need to get the email and then approve it before it shows up on the site.

Thanks for making it all the way to the bottom of this. I get to see her again in just about a month when they all come down for my daughter's friend's wedding.

Mt. Rushmore

This is the 4th of a series of semi-regular articles chronicling the 2017 road trip my youngest and I took to Wisconsin and back again. The next major stop on our trip was the Black Hills of South Dakota.

After Yellowstone, we drove the next morning into Grand Teton National Park. It was sort of a drive by and the weather was awful, thunder, lightning and hail and we got out of there as quickly as possible. I did get some shots, which I'll probably post later, but it's probably not worthy of a separate post. The other eventful thing that happened there was on our way out, we had to drive slowly around a downed tree that had evidently been hit by lightning probably about 15 minutes prior to us getting there.

The rest of the day was devoted to driving across Wyoming.  You don't realize how big Wyoming is until you're driving across it. I mean, it's just a big rectangle, but it just goes on and on and on. So, we ended up in Rapid City, South Dakota later in the evening. The next morning, Mt. Rushmore was on the agenda.

I've been to Mt. Rushmore previously, as an early teenager, so some of my memories have faded over time. They're in focus again. I have to say, I'm really glad we got an early start to our day and were able to make the entrance gate to the memorial right at 9:00 AM. Had plenty of parking, so we were just able to pull into the huge parking facility and park anywhere we wanted.

There were very few people around at that hour and so we walked the entrance leading up to the memorial. There are pillars on each side with the flags of all of the states of the United States on either side framing the sculpture. It doesn't get more American that this. Once out on the observation area, you have a pretty much unencumbered view and I took lots of shots. I wish there had been some clouds in the sky as I think I would have been able to have some more dramatic shots than the ones I took, which I think are pretty average.

After walking up to the viewing area, we decided to hike the Presidential Trail, which gives you different outlooks of the sculpture. I would highly recommend this trail, no matter what time of day, but the early morning hour that we took it meant that we pretty much had the trail to ourselves. We could linger and observe the sculpture without being interrupted by hordes of visitors that I'm sure walk the trail later in the day.

By the time we got back from the trail back up to the observation deck, it was probably a little bit after 10 in the morning and the observation deck was crowded, very crowded - think Disneyland type of crowds. We walked into the visitors center and walked around in there, then ended up near the entrance and decided that it was time to take our leave and head down to Custer State Park and Wind Cave National Park.

All in all, I'm glad we went. And I can't believe how lucky we actually were.  We got there at the perfect time and were able to leave at a good time to avoid the crowds. I can't imagine what the place would be like during the afternoon when the majority of people come to visit any attraction like this. I can't stress this enough.  Come as early as possible.