Flashback: Clava Cairns

The most famous of a group of cairns around Inverness. I posted pictures at the time (here, here, and here) but here's another that really shows the ring of standing stones around the cairn.

Flashback: Custer State Park

I posted some pictures of the strange rock formations in this South Dakota park, but these slightly blurry bison are also worth seeing.

Flashback: More Kata Tjuta

It is true that, judging by these pictures, the rocks don't look quite so otherworldly up close. They look a lot like—well, rocks, or any other desert mountains not inhabited by aliens. But I do like the red sands and trees in the surrounding desert.

Flashback: Kata Tjuta

When I said that Kata Tjuta wasn't interesting up close, I may have meant that it didn't have any of the hidden nooks with waterholes and rocks and trees that you find at Uluru. And it is easier to appreciate how very strange it is when you're far enough away to see it in some context.

The name means “many heads”and those domes do look like the heads of some alien creature making itself at home in the harsh landscape.

This picture, with some tiny humans for scale, gives a little idea of how big the domes are. There are 36 of them, and the tallest, Mount Olga, is taller than Uluru.

Flashback: Oops, not so fast! (Kata Tjuta)

I wasn't finished with the outback after all.

Uluru is located in a national park with another, much less famous, rock formation: Kata Tjuta, also known as The Olgas. In 2016, I only posted one picture, taken from a distance and promised more pictures later. (I suppose ten years counts as “later.”)

I also said that Kata Tjuta, unlike Uluru, was much more interesting from a distance, but I may just have been suffering from heatstroke, or exhaustion from swatting several million flies, because while I'm not sure that “interesting” is the best adjective for these deeply strange geologic blobs, they were definitely worth taking a good look at.

Urban poetry

Lunch in a park near my hotel.

The headstones along the wall behind the man are a common site in English parks. It means that the park used to be a churchyard or cemetery and the land has now been repurposed. The headstones have historical value, so they leave them there, propped up against the walls.

You sometimes see the same thing in graveyards that haven't been converted. It might be because they simply ran out of space at some point in the past, and old headstones were removed to make room for new ones. Or another churchyard nearby may have been abandoned and its headstones were moved to one that is still active.

They usually didn't move the bodies, however. So even though the headstones are moved out of the way, you're still eating lunch in a graveyard.

Where the deer and the antelope play

It's not all scenery in the park. We saw a big herd of bison, lots of prairie dogs, and several of these pronghorns.

Custer State Park

More of the odd and beautiful rock formations along the road in the park.

Cathedral Spires

These are the most famous—and spectacular—of the granite rock formations in the beautiful Custer State Park in western South Dakota.

Wild horses

It was a long drive today and I'm too tired to talk about pictures.

But here are some wild horses in the national park yesterday. I think they speak for themselves.

North Dakota

A bison in Theodore Roosevelt National Park today.

One of my fellow teachers had told me, “North Dakota is prettier than you'd expect,” and that's an understatement. Even in the dreary rain this morning, there was something magical about the highway stretching into the flat forever, with the farms and the yellow canola fields flying by.

And we spent most of the afternoon in the park, where there was abundant wildlife—bison, wild horses, prairie dogs—in a magnificent setting.

Tomorrow we cross Montana heading for Glacier National Park.

More tropical foliage

I do love the colossal leaves in the tropics; I remember seeing some in Costa Rica that were taller than I am. And there was bamboo everywhere.

Jardim Botânico

The botanical gardens were part of my Christmas Eve tour in Rio. They were closing early for the holiday, so our visit was a blur of orchids, bamboo and a lot of tropical foliage.

Homeless Jesus

But I did love this outside the cathedral: a status of Jesus as a homeless man (identifiable only by the wounds on his feet), created by a Canadian artist, Timothy Schmalz.

Urban poetry

A fountain in Tijuca National Park in Rio.

The monochrome months are here

Autumn arrives later and leaves earlier every year now, leaving us in what feels like endless grays and sepias.

Winter has its own beauties, but now that we seldom get snow anymore, it can definitely be monotonous. Brown, brown, brown, brown. Oh, look—gray!

Here are two pictures from Inwood Hill Park last winter, one a little filtered, one not.

A park (but from a distance)

The parade grounds look like a lovely park for any Regency couple to take a stroll in, but since it wasn't public—you had to buy a ticket to enter—we changed our minds about taking a shortcut across it and admired it from a distance.

The Truckee River

The trees and the water provided some respite from the heat, and the overwhelming Reno-ness of it all.

Random things I saw in Michigan

At the Pictured Rocks National Seashore: lichen on a wooden railing, beach through the trees, some forget-me-nots, and another look at Miner's Castle and the amazing green waters of Lake Superior. And I think that's it for the road trip pictures.

One last waterfall

And it's a good one. This is Tahquamenon Falls, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.