Little house on the prairie

 

More canola fields

Canola

Then we started to pass canola fields. The bright yellow fields alternating with greens were unexpectedly beautiful. The weather had also improved!

Windbreak

I didn't find this drive boring at all; although there definitely weren't a lot of landmarks or flashy geological formations to admire, I enjoyed how different it was from anything I'm used to. Like these trees, which act as a windbreak for the house behind them. Or the fences set back from the highway, which are there to catch the snow and prevent it from drifting into the road.

This is the real Big Sky Country. When nothing obstructs the horizon, the sky takes up a disproporionate amount of what you're seeing.

Jumping back to, say, North Dakota

 

There's a drought here in the UK, and most of the lawns at Merton have gone brown—they water a couple of the smaller ones. And many of the flowers in the gardens are dying or dead. There's been a little rain this week, but clearly not the amounts they need.

So here's a flashback to rainy and quite green North Dakota, the morning we set off from Jamestown, heading west. Flat, flat, and then more flat.

One more dinosaur

I don't remember what kind of dinosaur this is, but I still like the image.

T. Rex

There's a parade of mammal skeletons, including bison, elephants, and giraffes, in the main hall, and also some dinosaur skeleton replicas. I like the way the black and white photo makes the bones feel like part of the building design.

Ceiling details

I really love the design here—the plant ornamentation and the decorations on the wrought iron. It's not remotely minimalist, and not my usual taste, but with the patterns of shadow on the iron, it's really lovely.

Museum of Natural History

I know I've been jumping from state to state and country to country without any apparent plan recently, but it's a pleasant evening in Oxford and I'm sitting on the deck behind my hotel and I'd rather finish up one Oxford topic before jumping back to, say, North Dakota.

The museum building, completed in 1860, consists of a large exhibition hall, with decorated wrought iron pillars supporting a glass ceiling. (I may have mentioned how hot it was in there yesterday!) I took this picture from the gallery.

Sunday bird blogging

OK, this wandering albatross is most definitely, as Monty Python might point out, pining for the fjords, but as I have actually seen many albatrosses in the past year, at least one of them a wandering, I think it counts as bird blogging.

It was certainly the one thing that really surprised me in the natural history museum yesterday. It's one thing to know that these birds can have an eleven foot wingspan; it's quite another to actually see how fricking huge they are. (The woman standing behind the display is very useful for scale!)

Saturday reflections

At the Natural History museum in Oxford today.

The museum isn't air-conditioned, and the ceiling is glass, so it was very hot inside. But the adjoining Pitt Rivers museum is air-conditioned, and the kind woman in the cafe gave me a huge cup of ice with my lemonade just because she thought I looked like I could use it.

More closeups

I love that hand, with the Lilliputian cranes and trucks. Crazy Horse's face is almost 50% taller than the heads on Mount Rushmore.