[This is the long awaited Friday post. I don't think this is the best picture I got that day, but the subject is more recognizable for most people than the subject of some of the better shots. Be warned, the majority of this post is just journalling. Skip to the last paragraph unless you really just want to hear about my day.] After working half a day on Friday, I decided to spend the afternoon taking a few pictures either in the gorge or in Natural Bridge State Resort Park. As it happened, a friend of mine had recently mentioned riding the sky lift up to the bridge. I decided on the way up the parkway that sounded like a fine idea. Seven dollars later I am standing on a platform with tripod bag and camera bag in arms, trying to make sure that I don't lose one or the other as the chair comes up behindme and forced me to sit down. Unline in the old days, the operator has a little stop button that seemes to slow it down just enough that it's just a matter of sitting down comfortably. As a matter of fact all the equipment has been completely relaced since I was there last. It was all pretty and new. I had an enjoyable ride up to the top of the cliff, and I took a lot of pictures.

Just before I reached the top I met a man coming over the edge who said, "You can really lose your hat up there." It seemed rather non-sensical that he would say such a thing, as the wind wasn't blowing particularly hard, and I wasn't even wearing a hat. As I cleared the lip however, the change in wind speed was phenomenol. It was having quite a good blow, with gusts around thirty-five miles per hour. I was a little glad I wasn't wearing a hat, because I can say from experience it's a long hike to the bottom of that particular precipice, from either direction. I stepped off the skylift ad immediately began setting up my tripod at the edge of the lookout, right beside where the chairs come over the lip. My tripod bag was an immediate problem, because when my tripod is not in it, it's just a lightweight piece of cloth essentially. I looped my arm through it to make sure it wouldn't fly away, and even though it was a little awkward, I got a lot of shots form that angle.

After a while, I decided to head on out to Lover's Leap so that I could get a few pics of the bridge proper. The trail was guarded in most places with a fence constructed of four to six inch logs. It was sheltered from the wind, being in what amounted to a ditch heading out the ridge. The heat was noticeable, and it felt like the sun was baking me just a little, since the bare dirt and rock reflected it back to me. I realized the 36 ounces of Diet Pepsi in my bladder were making me uncomfortable. There just wasn't a place to get far enough off the trail to take a leak. I soldiered on for a couple minutes until I came up on a rather interesting family. I walked up to within a few feet of them, as they were struggling. The father was well-equipped to deal with the trail, but the oldest daughter, who I'd guess was about six, was strapped into metal braces, and she had a walker with wheels on it, that she was just pushing right along. The mother just appeared to have recently learned to walk without a similar contraption herself. The problem was that this trail was stll basically a ditch, and it was narrow in places, uneven in others, and filled with mud and water in still others. I followed for only a few seconds until I realized that the way forward was essentially blocked from oncoming hikers. I remembered there hadn't been anyone in my near vicinity behind me, and I walk pretty fast. I quickly backtracked around a bend and emptied my swollen bladder, just off the side of the trail. I caught up just before the trail emptied onto the cliff at Lover's Leap. It was then I noticed the perfectly healthy three year old leading this merry band by a good fifty or seventy-five feet. I imagined a terrible scenario in which she got to the edge and just kept right on going, but the father reined her in just as I was about to say something. The father and mother let me around, but then came an awkward moment as I was between them and their hurried handicapped daughter, whom I could just not manage to find a way around. I was about to surrender to the awkwardness and let her mom and dad back around when she came to a particularly difficult place in the trail where dad was going to have to do some heavy lifiting. I skipped up on a rock outcropping, said "Hi" as I went past, and made it to the edge in time to get a premium spot.

I'm not an experienced clifftop photographer, but I knew I wasn't comfortable with setting up the tripod, making it top heavy with the camera, and then putting it on the edge. I solved this little difficulty by only extending the legs a short way, making it lean back toward me, and then sitting down near the edge with my legs wrapped around the feet of the tripod. Just before I attached the camera, a gust of wind came along and my tripod bag which had somehow come dislodged from under my butt took sailing off along the cliff. Grabbing the tripod and pulling it toward me as I jumped up, I took off after it. Unlike the fellow who paid for his TP with his life, I made a conscious decision that I was going to start slowing down way before I got to the far edge. Fortunately for me, the gust died as quickly as it had come up, and the bag came to a stop in the direct middle of the clearing. Seeking a better solution I looped its strap with that of the camera bag, even though that induced a terrible fantasy of a black kite-like object containing my brand new camera flying away toward a long drop. I settled in for fifteen minutes or so of shooting, both of the Bridge and of the cliff that forms a triange with Lover's Leap and the Bridge. I took a few manual shots and a few set with auto, and a few set with landscape, but I think the sky was too bright just over the bridge for me to get the kind of quality I really wanted. We'll see what Photoshop can do for them, though. As I got up to leave, the family from earlier asked me if I could take a picture of them standing near the edge of the cliff with the openness behind them. I laid my own equipment down and obliged them. I grabbed my stuff and headed out the trail toward the bridge, but I hadn't made it more than maybe two hundred feet when I started hearing a chorus of people yelling, "Sir, sir, your camera, sir!" Looking down at my camera bag, which I felt so lucky to have since it was free and it said Canon on the side, I saw that its velcro enclosure had beccome, um, unenclosed. Red-faced I went back and retrieved my camera, and thanked all the people there for their commendable integrity.

A brisk walk later I am standing on Natural Bridge itself. It had been years too. I think Ethan was about four the last time I actually hked up there, so that's been about five years ago. I repeated my procedure and got some great shots of Lover's Leap. Really I don't know that are any GREAT shots of rock formations and trees. Not from that distance anyway. People seem to like them though, and I've been trying to mix a little of what people actually like into my pure art photography. I got some more shots on the way down, but I don't think I ever got the angle right to demonstrate what a sheer drop it is as the little metal chair goes over the side and the rider is suspended over a LOT of space. Come to think of it. I'd love to know what the actual steepest incline on the cable is.

After a nap, and then a ride to Winchester with the kids to pick up their mom from work (through a strange set of circumstances the Jeep was at Park and Ride in Stanton for three days last week, luckily without incident), me and the kids headed to a birthday party at Hood's Skating Rink. Ethan didn't even try on a pair of skates, but Delaney made me hold her hand endlessly as she tried to get better and better at skating. She isn't gifted at it, but I can see shed be okay if I took her down there very often. Eventually she could walk around in them without scaring me too badly that she would fall and catch the corner of something in her head. The highpoint of the evening came when I was talking to a relative of the birthday boy. The relative's name was Robbie. A little boy of about five years old came up, unremarkably holding a helium balloon in his hand, and shouted exuberantly, "Robbie, here, stick this in your mouth and suck on it!" I had to take Delaney for another trip around the rink before he saw my grin and heard my snicker and was offended. I was still occasionally involuntarily giggling twenty minutes later.