One for the road... Do you play?

As a kid I remember playing games on long car rides with my younger brother.  The alphabet game with road signs. Spell your name with the letters on the license plates of cars we passed. Count the number of cars of a particular color...  Whatever kept us from fighting as we sat for hours upon hours in the car long before there were portable DVD players or hand-held video games.

© Photographer: Cheryle Myers | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Over the mountains and through the woods we'd drive.  But it didn't matter if it was to Grandmother's house or to the beach that we were headed, our favorite road game was always Slug Bug.

© Photographer: Cheryle Myers | Agency: Dreamstime.com

You know the game... If you're the first to see a VW bug, you yell out the color and get to"slug" the other person.  That was half the fun, getting to punch your sibling.

© Photographer: Cheryle Myers | Agency: Dreamstime.com

But now, times have changed.  Kids have changed. And so have the games.  Now they call them "punch buggy's" and don't even punch each other.  "Punch Buggy Red!" They yell.  There's no winner, no loser, and no bruises.  Where's the fun in that?

© Photographer: Matthew Bamberg | Agency: Dreamstime.com

I think I prefer the red, black and blue, in an old fashioned game of Slug Bug.  What do you play on the road?

Summer travels

This last summer we took the girls on a vacation to California.  

Yes, we packed up the travel trailer and spent two weeks "camping."  Which means hours upon hours of driving and a daily dose of Dramamine for the youngest who never fails to get car sick.

In case you were wondering...  we must have looked like tourists.

In other words we had the GPS on the dashboard, a stack of maps in hand and a panic stricken look as we drove for hours on end through places we've never been.

The highlights?  The Redwoods, Disneyland and California Adventures, and Yosemite National Park.  

If you ask our kids what they enjoyed most it was campfires and smore's, meeting the Disney Princesses, and swimming in the river.

But the photographer in me was in heaven.  I created a memory book of photos for my daughters on Snapfish, and built a collection on Dreamstime titled "All Things Disney!"  http://www.dreamstime.com/all-things-disney!-rcollection18857-resi3427385     

So many memories.  I wonder where the journey will take us next.

The inner journey

These are a few of my favorite quotes about travel.  They express what I think about exploring the inner journey through the outer world.

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”

~Robert Frost

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” 

~Henry Miller

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
~Ansel Adams

My photography gives me an outlet.  A place to share my inner journey without completely putting myself out there.  Simply because, “Photography is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell.” 

~Kim Edwards