Tag Archives: Travel

Exploring Beatrice, Nebraska

During the week of September 2 – 7, Barb and I drove up to be with my Dad, his brother, and his four sisters – and we all met in the little town of Beatrice, Nebraska (which they grew up near). My previous post showed my favorite photos that I took on Labor Day, which was on Monday, Sept. 3rd. When we got to the motel that evening, Dad asked if I would like to go out with him and take some photos of the town. Of course, I jumped at the chance!. This post just shows about a dozen of my favorite photos that I took on the morning of September 4, 2012 in Beatrice, Nebraska.

We met in the breakfast area of the Holiday Inn Express just before 9:00 AM, and we didn’t have to go very far to take our first photo. The “Welcome to Beatrice” sign shown above was just outside, between us and the highway, US 77.

Turning around, I thought that the morning light looked really nice as it sort of wrapped around the curved base of the sign for the motel.

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Walking over to the base of the sign, I took the obligatory travel photo showing our “home away from home” for the week. That’s my Dad in the yellow “Wife Beater” T-shirt that seems to be his usual attire lately.

We got into my Honda CR-V and drove south on US 77 a few miles until we got to the Gage County Courthouse, which is located on the east side of US 77 (named North 6th Street) and north of Grant St. I took this photo from the west, looking east into the low morning sun, at 9:20 AM.

Walking east on Grant Street about 30 yards, gets you a nice view of the front of the courthouse building.

At the end of the front sidewalk, near where it meets the street, is a memorial to the veterans that have served our country in the armed forces.

I took the photo above (and all of the photos that morning) with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera mounted on top of my Gitzo GT1542T tripod. Whenever I use a tripod, I slow way down. I make sure that the camera is level, I study what is in the viewfinder, paying more attention to what is visible around the perimeter of the photo, and finally get the exposure settings the way that I want. I probably even rotated the circular polarizer on the front of the 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 lens to get the reflections of the windows to what looked best at the time. I probably took 2 minutes to take this one photo.

After I pressed the button on the remote cable release, I stood up straight, and noticed the couple right behind me. I do not know how long they had been patiently waiting for me, but I was in their way. I said “excuse me”, and they replied in a very friendly “no problem”, and I immediately got out of their path on the sidewalk. They seemed somewhat interested in what I was doing.

I was struck by how differently this was than how it probably would have played out back home in Austin. 9 times out of 10, they would have simply walked around me, up the sidewalk – into my shot – and I’d simply have to wait a minute or two for them to vanish – and hope no one else would wander into my photo. Sometimes I wait a long time to get the photo that I want.

As we walked back to North 6th St., I saw what appeared to be a very large black bird sitting on top of a church spire a couple of blocks away. It had spread its wings out wide, and was warming them in the morning sun.

That was as “telephoto” as my 12-50mm lens would get, and this was one time that I wished I had my Canon camera and lenses with me.

We wanted to walk south one block on North 6th Street to get to High Street. Halfway through that block, as I looked west across the street, I noticed the moon was setting above the Post Office building. It was 9:36 AM.

Just south of High Street, I caught up with Dad in a parking lot. He was getting setup to photograph St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Dad shoots a Canon 7D on a Manfrotto tripod. He is a fairly decent photographer!

Here are a couple of photos that I took of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. This church is where all my relatives that live in Beatrice attend, and it is significant to me in that I have attended both of my grandparents (on my father’s side) in this church.

We didn’t think about it at the time but we probably should have gone inside and photographed the beautiful stained glass windows.

We walked back to our car in the Burger King parking lot, across from the county courthouse. We then drove 7 blocks south on North 6th Street, turned west on Court Street, and drove 4 blocks to North 2nd Street. We parked on North 2nd Street, directly across from the Gage County Historical Society and Museum.

The building is the former Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Passenger Station. While riding around in the car later that week, my Aunt Virginia told a story of how she had boarded a train here sometime in the 1940’s to go the 40 miles to the “big city” of Lincoln, Nebraska. Evidently, it took a large portion of your day back then, if you drove to Lincoln in your car.

Just to the left (south) of the building is a nice looking red caboose, sitting under a windmill.

Across Court Street is a working grain elevator. It is between the railroad tracks and the Big Blue River.

The sun was getting rather harsh, and higher in the sky by 10:15 AM, but I still wanted to get an isolated photo of just the caboose. That is the shadow of the windmill cast upon the side of the caboose.

Although it is pretty “cliche”, I setup my tripod in the center of the railroad tracks, and took this photo looking north.

Walking back toward the front of the museum, I passed this decorative ironwork fence. I do not think that they have a problem with people just hanging around and sitting on their fence…

I have always thought it rather strange to see the Statue of Liberty out in the middle of the heart of America’s farmland, but here she is.

This copy of the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by the Boy Scouts of America in 1951.

I took 5 or 6 photos of this scene, and chose the one that had the American Flag outstretched best, the way I wanted it to be.

Across North 2nd Street, under a shaded structure, there are 4 different information signs that tell a lot about the heritage of Beatrice, Nebraska. Here is the one sign that told about the importance of the railroads to this area.

It was now 10:30 AM, the temperature was getting close to 90 degrees (32 C), and we needed to get back to the motel and get cleaned up so that we could get over to Aunt Jeanette’s for lunch before noon.

I realize that these are pretty much just “touristy” types of snapshots, but they do have a special meaning to me. I hope that you enjoyed seeing them.

Welcome to Beatrice, Nebraska

On Sunday, September 2, 2012, Barb and I drove to northern Oklahoma to spend the week with my Dad, his brother, and his four sisters that all met in the little town of Beatrice, Nebraska (which they grew up near). It was on Monday, which was the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S. when we finally made it to Nebraska. This short post just shows only 8 of my favorite photos from that day.

The Mid-West of the United States has experienced a severe drought this year, and we passed through several regions that looked like the entire crops were a failure, but when we stopped to take the photo above at the state line, it was sprinkling lightly.

The vast majority of the photos that I took on this trip were of my family members, but I will keep those to an absolute minimum here on my blog.

Beatrice, Nebraska is right at 780 miles (1255 km) from our home in Austin, Texas and the drive took us just under 13 hours total.

Here is a photo of my Aunt Jeanette and Uncle Jerry’s back yard. The lush, soft, green grass seems so much nicer than what is grown in yards back home in Texas. Love those tall trees, too!

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Aunt Jeanette seemed awfully proud and amused that they had brought the old outhouse from their previous home to their new home, which they moved into about a year and a half ago. I just had to get a few photos of that old outhouse…

I was just trying to get an semi-interesting composition of the wagon wheel with the outhouse, when this little squirrel decided that he needed to check out what I was up to!

I’m not sure when Aunt Jeanette acquired an old outhouse to be used as a yard decoration, but it had to have been at least 40 years ago, because they had it in their old yard when we used to visit them when I was just a kid in school.

Aunt Jeanette does a nice job of keeping the old outhouse decorated. And no, it has never been used for its original purpose (at least not for 50 years).

After my Dad’s brother, Uncle Jack, took us to dinner at a local restaurant, we went by to visit his new home at the Assisted Living Center.

Uncle Jack had moved there in the last couple of years, and so none of us had seen it yet. I took more than a dozen photos inside, and it is a very nice place. I have decided to only show this one of my Dad, Robert (on the left) and his only brother, Jack (on the right). Jack is 88 years old now!

For the photo above, I used my Olympus FL-600R flash unit on top of my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, and pivoted the head upward so that the light would bounce off of the relatively low white ceiling.

As we were leaving Uncle Jack’s place, and still standing around in the parking lot, I noticed that the sun was setting. I jogged across the parking lot to hastily snap this Sunflower Sunset photo. It seemed to symbolize the American Midwest as a very fitting close to a fun day of travelling.

Niagara Falls from a Hotel Room

Things at work are getting pretty busy again, and I haven’t been anywhere near a camera for a week now. So, I don’t have anything recent to share with you, so I went digging around in my archives and decided to show a series of photos of Niagara Falls.

Barb won a round-trip pair of airline tickets at the Alereon Holiday (Christmas) Party in December of 2008. We had a year to “cash them in”. We couldn’t think of anywhere that we really wanted to go, so we waited, and waited, and waited. Sometime during 2009, Barb’s friend Pam told us about a trip that she and her husband Bill had taken to Niagara Falls. Evidently they had a hotel room with a fantastic view of Niagara Falls.

That sounded like a great photographic opportunity to us, so a week before our airline tickets expired, we made reservations for June 2010 to fly to Buffalo, NY. We made the reservations over 6 months before we wanted to travel. We decided to go the week of June 22nd, 2010 because we knew that the days would have the maximum number of hours of daylight.

We made our reservation for the Niagara Falls Marriot, which is on the Canadian side of the falls in Ontario. We asked for a room on the upper floors, so that we could have a good view of the falls. We were told that we were guaranteed to get a room in the upper 6 floors (of the 23 total).

Zoom ahead in time to June 22nd, 2010. We had flown into Buffalo, rented a car for a week, and drove into Canada. We had not seen the falls, or any of the Great Lakes. Looking at the map showed that we should be very close, but we had not seen any water of any kind before we arrived at the hotel. When we checked in, I asked the clerk where the heck the Niagara Falls were actually located, and she said that they were right out back, and we should see them when we got to our room. So we hauled all of our luggage up to our room and opened the drapes. This is what we saw:

Holy cow! What a sight!

The shot above was taken right after we returned from dinner – right at 6:31 PM. The last photo in this post was taken at 10:03 PM, a span of only 3 and ½ hours.

The first photo to at the top of this post is shown again here. It is a panoramic, that is composed of 5 individual photos stitched together using an older version of Photoshop.

Niagara Falls is composed of two separate waterfalls. In the photos above, the falls on the left are called the American Falls, because the land on both sides of that waterfall is in the United States (in New York state). The falls on the right span across the international boundary with Canada, and are known as Horseshoe Falls, because of its U-shape.

The most significant thing that I want to bring your attention to is that every single photo in this post was taken from the exact same location, and that was from our room, and through a window that I really had to hunt for an acceptably clean spot to photograph through.

Both of the previous photo used my 24-105mm lens, zoomed all the way out to 24mm. I was using my 2 month old Canon 5D Mark II, which is a full-frame sensor camera. The next photo, of Horseshoe Falls, was taken with the lens zoomed to 50mm.

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I switched to my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, zoomed it to 173mm, and took this photo.

The method that I used to reduce unwanted reflections in the window was developed on the spot. At first I could see the white reflections of the curtains on the right and left sides of the photo, so I pulled them as wide open as they would go (and away from the camera). I did use a hood on the end of each lens. I positioned my tripod as close to the window as possible, but the heater/air-conditioner unit was directly under the window, which complicated that a bit. With my longer 70-200mm lens, I could have let the lens hood actually touch the window, but I did not want the vibrations from the air-conditioner, which were travelling up the window, to be transmitted to the lens, and therefore to the camera. So I left a 0.25 inch (6mm) gap between the lens and the window pane. Lastly, I got a large towel from the bathroom, folded it neatly lengthwise, and draped it over the end of my lens, and bridging the gap between the lens hood and the window pane. That sealed off any extraneous light from coming in from the sides, reflecting off of the glass window, and reducing the contrast in the photo. Lastly, we turned off all of the lights in the hotel room, except for the light in the bathroom, which was a long way behind us. (We needed some light in the room so that we could pour our wine…)

This photo was of the American Falls, using the 70-200mm lens zoomed all the way out to 200mm. This was taken at 6:45 PM, and there was still plenty of daylight, so the shutter was 1/640 of a second and the aperture was f/7.1. Every photo in this blog post was shot in Aperture Priority and had the ISO set to 200.

That photo was using the “longest” lens that I had. I then decided to switch to my “shortest” lens, a 16-35mm f/2.8 II lens. The next photo used that lens zoomed to 22mm, and shows a nice rainbow from the mist of Horseshoe Falls.

Back to the telephoto zoom to get a closer view of that rainbow in the mist.

The little boat just boat in front of American Falls is the Maid of the Mist.

There are actually several of these little boats, but they all seem to share that name. People board the Maid of the Mist on the Canadian side of the river, just past the American Falls. Once on board, they get you up close as they pass by the American Falls, and then take you deep into the mist at the base of Horseshoe Falls. We did take that boat ride a few days later, and I HIGHLY recommend it!

Putting my wide-angle 16-35mm zoom lens back on, I rotated the camera as far to the left as I could, and took this 1 second exposure with the lens zoomed to 19mm. This is our hotel (Marriot) and a few others lined up along this spectacular view.

You can see the reflection of our curtains along the left edge of the photo, but that was the best that I could do at the time….

We drank a glass of wine, relaxed, and waited for the sun to go down.

This next photo was taken at 9:19 PM. Even on the longest day of the year it would have been dark for 30 minutes by now back home in Texas!

The lens was at 19mm and the exposure was a 1.6 second shutter, f/6.3 aperture, and +2/3 stop exposure compensation.

Just 10 minutes later, at 9:29 PM, the sky had quickly turned to twilight. The next photo was taken at that time, with the lens zoomed out to 173mm, but the shutter was now open for 5 seconds.

Less than 2 minutes later, the color of the water seemed to change. What the heck? Using the exact same camera and lens settings, I quickly took this photo.

Within a couple more minutes, the color of the water had changed a couple of more times! It became apparent that this was a man-made phenomenon, but we had no idea how on earth they were doing it.

I was thrilled! I thought my photography was over for the evening, but it was far from over. The scene before us was simply becoming more spectacular with each passing minute!

This next photo was taken at 9:35 PM. The exposure settings were an 8 second shutter, f/6.3 aperture, + 1/3 stop exposure compensation.

Only three minutes later, I took this next photo, but I changed the lens from 35mm to 50mm focal length. I also used all the same exposure settings, except the shutter was now open for 13 seconds.

The change of colors was spectacular to see!  A couple days later, while walking along the river, we saw the large spot lights that they use to illuminate the falls with color. The lights were on the Canadian side, and they shine them across the river to paint the falls with colored light. We never saw the “light beams” cross the river, and I do not see them in these photos right now, either. Very clever!

As it got darker, I had to keep increasing the amount of time that the shutter would stay open. I was now up to 15 seconds.

And at 10:01 PM, I was up to a 20 second exposure.

The longer I kept the shutter open, the more amount of mist would be in the air, scattering the light, and obscuring the beautiful pastel colors of the falls.

This next shot was my last shot of the evening. It was taken at 10:03 PM, and the shutter was open for 25 seconds. It pretty much had to be my last shot, as the camera has a limit of 30 seconds for the shutter speed (in Aperture Priority mode), and the mist was really overtaking the falls.

So there you have it. Yet another sequence of photos, depicting a thin slice of time, where I had my camera with me, and was willing to experiment with it. Niagara Falls is certainly a site to see!

Ruidoso Downs Horse Races

This post contains lots of photos, but I think that I need them all to tell the photography story that I want to tell. As you can see in the photo above, it was nearly 5 weeks ago on Friday, June 1, 2012 when Barb and I visited the Ruidoso Downs horse racing track in the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico.

I had never been to a horse race in my life, before this day, but many of the people that we had visited with that week in Ruidoso had highly recommended it. We had spent a pretty leisurely week up to that point, where I had spent most of my time studying the manual for my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera. We had only scheduled one “tourist activity” for each day, and today was going to be the horse races.Even though Barb had been there once before, many years ago, frankly, I had no idea what to expect.

Walking only a few yards from where I had taken the photo above (just off the highway), you can see the grandstands across the narrow valley at the base of this small mountain.

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As we drove up their entrance drive, I just had to stop to take this photo showing the large bend of the oval dirt track.

I was rather surprised that there was no entrance fee, and that the parking was free, too. We only had to walk about 100 yards (meters) from the car to the closest end of the grandstand. That’s where the entrance to the Jockey’s Club was. I just assumed that the entrance that we went through in order to pay to get into the grandstand.

The friendly group at the door let me know that we were welcome to pay to come into the Jockey Club, but if we just wanted to get into the grandstand, we just needed to walk 20 yards to our right. We did exactly that, and I was completely surprised that we could just walk right in – for free – and sit wherever we wanted to!

We had arrived just as the first race of the day had finished. There is a 25 minute delay between each race. (I think there were going to be 9 races that afternoon.) During that delay, they water down the track, and then drag an implement behind a tractor to get the dirt just how they want it.

While we were waiting for the next race to begin, an usher asked to see our tickets. Tickets? What tickets?

I know that I had a dumb expression on my face as I told him that we never encountered anyone asking us to pay for a ticket. He told us that we were sitting in “Reserved Seating” and that if were welcome to sit in the bleachers down below – which were indeed free.

OK, so we moved about 10 feet closer to the dirt track, but our legs were in the direct sun.

And they’re off!  What the heck?  The next race had started and I hadn’t even prepared my camera! Just get what you can…. I raised my camera to my eye, saw the that Olympus instantly focused on the lead horse, so I snapped this photo just as they crossed the finish line!

Wow! We were 30 feet (10 meters) or so from the track, and you could FEEL the horses pounding the ground with their hooves!

Checking the OLED display on the back of my camera, I saw that I had indeed caught the lead horse just after it had crossed the finish line, but wait just a darned minute… horses do not have 8 legs!

Hmmm… The camera was in my default settings: ISO 200, f/8.0, aperture priority, which resulted in a shutter speed of only 1/160 second. No wonder that fast moving horse had 8 legs!

While the grounds keepers prepared the track for the next race, I had some time to think about which camera settings I wanted to change.

I had read in the camera owner’s manual that the camera could shoot 9 frames per second (fps), and this seemed like a great place to try that out! I also changed to Shutter Priority mode, and set the shutter speed to 1/1600 second. To keep a good depth-of-field I didn’t want a wide aperture, so I had to increase the ISO to 800 just to keep the aperture to f/10. I also changed the autofocus to Constant autofocus mode. Lastly, I changed the Image Stabilization to mode IS2, which is for horizontal panning when following moving objects.

After the water truck and the tractor, the jockeys and the horses for the next race always ride past the grandstand and then double-back to get to the starting line.

The races today did not go around the oval track. Instead, they were straight line races, just like at a dragster race – but with about 10 horses at the same time!  As they got the horses into the starting gate, I simply walked down to the railing at the edge of the track, and positioned myself so that I had a good view of the finish line. I zoomed my 12-50mm lens all the way out to 50mm.

And they’re off!  It doesn’t take these race horses long – maybe 7 or 8 seconds before they get close enough that I push the shutter button halfway and lock focus onto the lead horse, and instantly push it the rest of the way and take the following sequence of photos.

Now that you have had a look at this sequence, I want to let you know that I only showed you every other photo (I skipped the odd numbered photos, and only showed you the even numbered photos). Even at the 4.5 frames per second that I am showing you, you should get a sense of just how fast these horses are moving as they came flying past me!

Also worth noting is that as I kept the shutter button held down, and since I was shooting RAW + JPG, the buffer in the camera filled up, and there was a delay between that last shot and the next shot.

Also worth noting is that I did not understand at the time that when the Olympus OM-D E-M5 is shooting a 9 fps sequence, it locks focus at the time of the first shot – even if the autofocus is set to Constant Autofocus. What saved me here is that my aperture was f/10, which gives a fairly deep depth-of-field, especially on a Micro Four-Thirds sized image sensor.

As we waited for the next race, I reviewed the photos on the back of the camera. I didn’t like my composition. I had kept the lead horse in the center (where my focus point was), and so all of the horses were on the left side of the picture, with the right hand side being empty. I made a mental note to try and improve on that. I also told myself to wait until they got a little closer to the finish line before I started machine-gunning RAW + JPG images onto my UHS-1 speed-class SDHC memory card.

It began to get darker as rain clouds approached, and I refused to increase the ISO setting above 800, but that meant that I had to open the aperture form f/10 to f/6.3 AND lengthen the shutter from 1/1600 to “only” 1/1000 second.

Finish line!

The previous 5 photos were taken consecutively – I did not leave out every other one this time. I reviewed this sequence on the back of my camera while they paraded the jockeys and horses for the next race.

It was raining to the south of us, and those rain clouds were blocking the sun. I was going to have to change my settings to compensate accordingly.

Fortunately, the rain was passing us to the east.

Even so, it was getting darker. I was already at the widest aperture that this lens was capable of (f/6.3), but I had to do something. I lengthened the shutter to 1/800 second, but still needed to do something in addition. All I could think of at the time was to zoom the lens to a wider angle, which would support a wider aperture of f/5.7 that I needed. That resulted in a 36mm focal length, equivalent to 72mm on a full frame camera. (Later that evening, I realized that I should have just switched to my 45m f/1.8 lens!)

I decided that I now felt comfortable enough with my timing to wait for them to get closer to the finish line, that I also decided to change to the “low speed” Continuous Shooting Mode of 3.9 fps.

I can’t remember why I made that decision at that time. Maybe I remembered reading in the manual that the OM-D E-M5 will focus between each shot at this lower speed, or maybe I just got lucky. For whatever the reason, it really helped, because I now had a much narrower depth-of-field due to my wider aperture setting.

And they’re off!

So I follow the lead horse, keeping my focus point in it, until I think I’ve timed it just right.

Things move very fast, and I just saw another horse enter the left side of the frame….

Wow! Horse #10 wins the race!

Too bad that I didn’t even know that horse #10 existed until it went thundering right past me – only 3 or 4 yards (meters) away….But the continuous autofocus had locked onto the front legs of horse #3, not horse #10!

Maybe, just maybe I’ll get a good sequence before we get rained on!

The rain was staying east of us, but it just kept getting darker. I had to to open the aperture some more – to f/5.3, which meant that I was now zoomed to only 28 mm.

I also didn’t like the limited number of frames that I captured when using the “low speed” continuous shooting mode, so I went back to the 9 fps rate.

This is the photo captured as they crossed the finish line.

Notice how the horses change their stride immediately after they cross the finish line. They don’t stop instantly, just like you need several steps after running full speed before you slow down and stop.

We could smell the rain coming, and we didn’t want to walk the 100 yards back to the car in the rain, so we decided it was time to go now.

Just before we left the grandstand, I turned around and took this last photo. Barb and I had been sitting on the bleacher in front of the two guys in the white cowboy hats near the left edge of this photo.

I never really got the sequence of photos that I was hoping to get, but I had a really fun time trying, and I’m still amazed that it didn’t cost us any money at all!

Grace O’Malley’s Irish Pub in Ruidoso, NM

It seems like a long time ago that we were in Ruidoso, NM. My previous post was from a 3 1/2 hour slice of time on Memorial Day afternoon as Barb and I walk up Sudderth Drive. This post is from an even narrower slice of time – about one hour – during the next afternoon.

The day after Memorial Day, I spent the morning still reading, marking, and highlighting, the owner’s manual for the Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera that I had been in possession of for less than a week. For lunch, we went to a casino/resort owned and operated by the Apache tribe, known as The Inn of the Mountain Gods.

We rarely gamble, and were not interested in doing so that afternoon, so we just walked around the facility taking lots of photos – both inside and outside this beautiful facility.

After a couple of hours, we headed back into Ruidoso, which was only about 5 miles down the easy-to-drive 2 lane road. Since the afternoon was still relatively young, we decided to stop at Grace O’ Malley’s Irish Pub that had been so busy the previous afternoon.

The place was pretty much empty at 2:45 PM, so we had our pick of which bar stools we wanted to sit on. I made sure that we were on the side of the bar that was nearest to the large windows on the street side of the building.

For those that know me, I rarely drink beer anymore, but all of the hard alcohol staring me in the face just didn’t seem inviting at all at this time of day. So we asked the bartender what local beers he could recommend to us. Barb settled on a light colored beer that had been brewed with hatch chili peppers, and I settled on a Fat Tire from Colorado (close enough to New Mexico for me).

While we were getting settled in to our spot, I just started playing with my new camera.

Barb was sitting to my right, and these beer taps were just to my left.

With the mixed lighting situation (window light and tungsten lights), I reminded myself to get a photo of my ColorChecker Passport so that I could make sure I could color-correct all of the photos from this visit later in Lightroom, if needed.

So we  sat there talking and playing with the new Olympus camera.

The timestamp on the next photo tells me that I drink this much beer in 17 minutes:

About this time, we started talking to the bartender – he was only “kinda busy”, and he knew that we were tourists in his town. Here he is making some mixture of two different beers, and is known as a “Back and Tan”. He explained to us that this beer concoction had to be made from two specific types of beer. I forget the first one, but the second one had to be Guiness Stout, as it would float on top of the first one (if he didn’t pour it too fast).

We were getting relaxed from the beer, and it was very pleasant inside this Irish Pub.

After 45 minutes, we had finished our beers, and decided that it was time to head on out. When we got outside, I wanted to get a couple of photos of the outside of the pub. The first photo was the opening photo to this post, and the second one I took had the moon in it!

So there you have a few photos taken within a one hour slice of time. What perfect way to spend time on a vacation!