Modern Vespa

A few more eves obsessively chasing the fall colors and light...

You know, it's bad enough that riding season here is grinding inexorably to an end, but it's also an end to some of my favorite scooter-inspired photography.

Now if some of our Southern Hemisphere peeps could help pick of the slack.....

Last couple years I've pushed my season right up into December, so I ain't giving up yet!

Man I love fall...a compilation of Th-Sat evening rides:


Return of the elk. Counted over 70!

Old mill town cabins. Deary ID.

Fall colors, clear stream. Kendrick ID.

I'm starting to like it better too.

Been a crappy fall here so far weather-wise. Nice to see the sun is out somewhere.

We won the lottery weather-wise this entire year...unless this long dry spell turns into an all out drought.

But, still, no flooding, no hurricanes, no complaints.

Loos great - it's the same here, the best autumn I can remember for many, many years!

Phenomenal weather continues! 70-degree afternoons beneath pale blue skies...paradise if it weren't for the fookin' insects -- gotta stop every twenty minutes to wash mah faceshield

But a small price to pay for an embarrassing array of short, evening rides and long afternoon rides.

Saturday I tooled 50 miles North to the nearly-ghosted town of Oaksdale WA to pay my respects, empty backroads and open fields for three hours....


Fall colors just keep deepening.





Oaksdale WA

Oaksdale WA

Oaksdale WA

Oaksdale WA

So, nothing like this, then?


Yesterday at the family farm.

Auts! Turning colder here too...my guess is that we'll see the first snow flakes within 2 weeks.

So THAT's where all our Pacific Northwet went!

Nasty.

Another weekend, another boarded up farm town: Colton WA.

When I worked out here as a carpenter one winter, the little, green market (below) was still open and hanging on. I turned thirty that winter.

Today the building barely stands. I was thinking about how quickly the world is changing...and then I realized that I did that work in that town a quarter century ago. Once that seemed a lifetime; now it feels like last week.

Typing this this morn I just finally "got" Washington Irving's tale of Rip Van Winkle.


"Ch...ch...changes...." Friday's walk home.

"So much depends on one red wheel barrow...."

Colton, WA.

Colton, WA.

I used to buy coffee here, seemingly yesterday.... Colton, WA.

Great pics tdrake. Seems as if the sun is always setting on Moscow. Or at least five miles away.

I don't know much about photography but these photos are top quality (for me). Nice to read about your reminiscing.

I have to search for my sunglasses before I visit this thread.

Thanks! All I know about photography is to wander around obsessively looking for cool stuff and then to point my phone in that general direction.

Oh, and to throw out 99% of every shot I take.

Not for long -- November comes and BAM! it's like someone lowers the curtain around here; the clouds blow in and the wind strips the trees seemingly overnight.

...then the time changes and suddenly it's winter.

Until about May.

Y'day I think I caught the last arboreal color to be found (below), and today, amid 20mph winds, I was back to chasing sunsets.


Last of the fall colors...le sigh.

Genesee bar/fire-dept.

Ode to Willa Cather.

Just one more damn "every sunset is a blessing and thank the gods I don't live in the city!" shot.

Boringly beautiful.

What else ya got?

You do a damned good job of wandering around IMHO.

Now, the throwing out part might be the secret. My dad loved taking pictures, which he was truly pretty bad at. He liked slides, which unfortunately were a bit pricey for our small farmer economy....he'd perhaps go through a 36 exposure roll in a year.....but would only throw one out unless it was totally black or otherwise unrecognizable. Spent too much for them to just throw them away. He liked to have slide shows for the relatives' visits, and my teenage self would cringe at some of the slides I'd see every darned time.... "Now if you look back there, that little brown dot is an antelope!" I got to be his projectionist, and I was a bit too trigger happy and got chastised regularly for not giving his audience time to appreciate his art.

After he passed I had a field day tossing out a bunch of his crap slides...though I treasure the accidentally great ones...

In the last couple years my packrat uncle passed away and my ma moved into an assisted care place, which, combined, led to my generation "inheriting" not only all my ma's photos and all my grandparents' photos but also boxes upon boxes of our great (and great great!) grandparents' photos.

The albums of complete strangers (that is: my ancestors) doing the Grand European Tour c. 1905 are kinda cool (as in "cool for about five minutes once every 20 years), but man o' man it's a cruel reminder that no one really wants to look at yer old photos.

Or inherit your shell or rock collection.

And yet it feels so utterly wrong tossing that stuff out.

Sentimental creatures we are.

On the other hand, my very shy grandmother left behind about 100 watercolors, none of which were museum quality, but now we all have a few of her pics up, which is pretty cool.

Last edited by tdrake on Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:29 am; edited 1 time in total

These last two posts explain my parents and my personal situation to a T.
The slide shows, the slides, inheriting lame collections that you could never throw away, and so on.

Thanks for the memories!

Stunner after stunner tdrake - there's an exhibition here, and maybe a calendar..?

I think a calendar would be a great idea. Wonderful pictures.

Absolutely!!

In the last century. many, many years ago, one of my migrant worker jobs was helicoptering National Geographic photographers into very, VERY, remote areas.
They had several foot lockers of film. You, know that stuff that came in little canisters. I complemented them on the work and great photos. They said it was not that big on deal. "On this shot we will take around 14,000 photos and use between 7 and 14. Even the monkeys we are photographing could come up with a good picture with that many."

However, in the moment they are all great photos as all of yours Mr. Drake....in this moment. And to be honest, in many more moments in the future. You do good work.

Dunno what's the most interesting part of this -- all that film for so many shots or your helicoptering gig!

Have you written about that job? I wanna read more about it!

Thanks for all your support, y'all! I still feel like taking pics is really just an excuse to look for cool stuff.

Doubt there are many more rides left to this year, but the clouds broke briefly on Sunday afternoon and for a bit the temps broke the 40 degree barrier, so, after half an hour of piling on a dozen layers and warming up the scoot in the sun until I could finally get 'er started, I headed out for a brisk hour and a half.

Woulda been nice to catch one more sunset but the last half hour was plenty brisk as it was: 35 degrees as I pulled in the driveway.

Truly nothing new on this ride but Imma posting a few pics to remind myself in the dead of winter that a lil November riding can be found.

Last (?) kick at the cat. Sorry cat.

Out for a chilly, really chilly, 103 miles, which proved a wee bit too ambitious - --- out too far, too late -- and as the sun slipped behind the hills I was simultaneously punished with plummeting temps and a rewarded with stunning skies...which I could not really capture on film.


The long view, facing East.



This view hasn't changed a 100 years. Bethany Lutheran to the left.

Bethany Lutheran. Signs say est. 1895 by a group of settlers who moved here directly from Norway.

First blush of winter wheat amid all the otherwise varied but dull shades of summer brown.

Americana.

Americana...with a little touch of Italy.

End of season. *Sigh.* Gonna be a long winter.

Great pics... As usual.

You should really spice things up and shoot for mediocre next time.

Wow -- that was a long, long winter.

But I do believe we've made it back, more or less....

Beautiful!
I love the golden light.
I'll have to come back and spend more time appreciating all of your trip!

Wow, those snow scenes are awesome. Thank you for your sacrifice.

I'm doing my late winter/early spring riding vicariously. My first chance at riding won't be until April....that is, if I've healed properly. I think if I tried to mount up before that my wife would break my other leg.

Doctor said I needed more gravel in my diet. Also, the Vespa was sorta getting lonely out in the barn all by its lonesome.

Also, also: look ma, no snow!

Great choice! You might have even more fun!
Please remember to stop riding for a minute and take some more pictures for those of us who envy you...

You're pushing that "no snow" a bit hard.

But then again, if you're waiting for the absolute end, it will be April and you'll miss some great riding.

Does your Vespa know BTW?

Thanks OldCoot and will do!

And, yeah, "relatively no snow" after the 18" we had in our yard just ten days ago!

But still froze me keister off -- or my mitts, actually; I miss the V's heated grips -- riding dirt roads in the rain y'day afternoon, out where the snow did, indeed, still linger, tho I did encounter my first "river crossing" where it was flooding and washing out a road.

No complaints, tho, as I was certain we would be neck deep in the flooding that wound up drowning so much of the midwest.

Vespa says typical midlife crisis, chasing a younger redhead, and that I'll be back when my hip starts acting up. ...tho she did get a new carb and tune up last week, so enter the polygamous years.

Likely the only redhead that it's safe chasing.

So, I don't want to clog this space with pictures of a dual-sport Honda, but...

In the two and a half days I've had the Honda I've now logged 105 miles , all in the eves either after the 8 hour drive dragging it home from Ellensburg WA or after work, in the cold, in the rain, and all but just a few of those miles on dirt roads.

And that's really the deal -- after three years and 17,000 local miles, nearly every one of those 105 miles have been on roads I've never seen before, and I haven't started to scratch the surface of the thousands of miles of farm and fire roads that define this area, not to speak of the state.

As much as I love the beauty of machines -- and I really unapologetically do! -- I've found searching for the new in the nearby has become an equal obsession, and it offers something I'm otherwise not very good at: hope. It's a small, probably meaningless and very selfish hope -- that I'll simply see something I've never seen before -- but it still focuses my brain on the future, what might be, rather than on the past, where there is often a lot of regret or nostalgia.

I gotta find the quote in "Zen" where Pirsig says something about the immortality of motocyclists -- how we don't fear death because it is forever out in front of us and so riding just keeps pushing it forward...and in that idea rests the seeds of this "hope" I've rediscovered: a way of concentrating on what might be around the next corner rather than my usual obsession with what might have or should have been.

Appropriately, then, I discovered a new road (ironically, paved, and I can ride it on the Vespa!) that brought me to a new cemetery.

And also appropriate that it was cold enough out by the time I found it that my phone battery died after three shots.


Moscow Mt.

Cemeteries?!? you have my full approval.

Those Hills weren't particularly long-lived, were they?

Yeah, as always visiting these sites reminds me that the two things we take for granted more than any other is that we won't have to frequently bury our own children and we'll probably live past forty.

So I usually ride home thinking "you know, this is all cake."