On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Happy Fourth everyone!
Here’s hoping to a great day for you all. I hope to get some pictures – to show at a later time – so send in anything appropriate.
Should you have any pictures (tasteful, relevant, etc….) you can email them to [email protected] or just use this nifty link to start an email: Start an Email to send a Picture to Post on Balloon Juice
Late July, farm near Pueblo, Colorado. That corn just loves that strong Colorado sun and gets so sweet.
Where it was taken: My back yard in Baltimore
When: 4/24/17
Commenter nym: BroD
Other notes or info about the picture: The New World Order
Wow. Reminds me of the “vulture tree” we saw in Taos on the way to/from our place. No picture as good as that, but hopefully I can dig up something neat to share.
Top image – Hendrick Park, Eugene, Oregon
Bottom image – Crater Lake National Park
When: June 21, 2017
Commenter nym: randy khan
Other notes or info about the picture: Top image: Digitalis flowers in the rhododendron garden. Bottom image: This is the view from Crater Lake Lodge on a day with no wind – the lake is almost a perfect mirror.
Wow, that’s some still water! Great picture -thanks!
South Texas. Close to Pawnee, Texas (yes that is a real place).
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pawnee,+TX/@28.5944249,-97.9702745,11.75z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x865d451dfc3ae051:0x59f4c740e319172e!8m2!3d28.6527644!4d-98.0027813This is part of our family farm. I spent 6 summers here growing up. Currently it is uninhabited except for the cows we are keeping. We were down for a family reunion and stopped by to look at the place. When this was taken it was 105 degrees.
Nym: Lee
I spent a lot of my early childhood living in Texas; this looks mighty familiar, and that’s likely some of the best beef you’ll ever eat, should that be your thing.
Sorry to hear it’s uninhabited, and to see the debris. It’s a tough thing to keep those ranches going. If my uncle didn’t hunt (and his daughter and SIL), I expect their ranch would get a lot less attention and time spent there.
And to wrap up this all-American celebration, from Maureen G.:
My husband and I went to the Solid Sound Festival at MassMOCA over the past weekend. We visited the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, one of the most picturesque New England towns ever, and Nick Offerman sang to us about how he is NOT Ron Swanson (other than liking whiskey and working with his hands)
Happy 4th everyone, we live and love a beautiful country full of good people; don’t let the jerks ruin your celebration of this most glorious Union.
Elizabelle
Beautiful photos. Want some of that sun-sweetened corn. With fresh tomatoes. Heaven.
Happy 4th. To independence and pursuit of happiness for us all.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Oh the jerks have been out in force here, fucking fireworks. They are trying my patience since they are annoying my cocker spaniel.
Speaking of jerks, I went to the store and on my way back was this asshole in a loud and big ass Dodge truck, revving his engine at the stop light and then racing off until he reached the next light. There was an AK sticker on the back window. Asshole.
Waratah
Alain, some Rocky Ford cantaloupe to go with the corn.
Lovely photos. Randy Oregon is on my wish list. Happy Fourth of July everyone. Our farmers market is open this morning and I am hoping to find some early corn.
OzarkHillbilly
The best sweet corn I ever ate was when I was just a wee child (10ish?). The old man stopped at a roadside stand in Iowa on the way to my Aunt and Uncle’s SW Ontario fishing camp. We finally got to their island about 10 pm and instead of Betty firing up the kitchen to make us a late dinner, she just boiled up that corn. Mmmmm, mmmmm, good.
Really nice shot of the black vultures, ours around here are turkey vultures. We had a buzzard tree down in the valley below us, a big old granddaddy of a dead sycamore in the middle of a field, until a couple years ago when it finally gave up the ghost and fell over in a storm. Now they catch that morning sun somewhere else. Usually. One early AM last week, I drove by that field and there were well over a dozen out there perched on a number of hay bails waiting for the sun. First time I’d ever seen that.
MomSense
Great photos this morning. Happy 4th everyone.
Alain the site fixer
@Waratah: oh, yeah. Best melon ever! And add some Palisade peaches and some Pueblo chiles and now we’re talking!
debbie
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
You want an asshole pickup truck driver? Try this one.
Sloane Ranger
Loved the vultures and the New England ones. Would love to vist that area.
satby
Beautiful pictures everyone! Thanks!
rikyrah
Appreciate how the pictures show that beauty is everywhere.?
randy khan
@Waratah:
Oregon really is beautiful. We ended up driving more than 1,000 miles on the trip – as far southwest as Ashland and as far northeast as The Dalles, on the east side of the mountains. I’ll be sending in some more photos once I edit them properly.
Miss Bianca
@Alain the site fixer: Sounds like the best Fourth picnic ever! mmmm, Olathe Sweet Corn…
Lee
Here is a bit more backstory about the land.
We have a total of 300 acres. A 100 acre plot & a 200 acre plot. This picture is about dead center of the 200 acre plot. My Dad grew up on the 100 acre plot.
In the late 1800’s my great-grandfather & his brothers immigrated from Germany and settled in this area of Texas (interesting sidenote: my grandmother’s Texas birth certificate is in German). Around the turn of the century, they purchased several large plots of land. Through the years the land switched hands a couple of times between ours and a couple other families (one would get tired of farming & move to the city, then move back). The ‘front’ 100 of the 200 acres is part of that original purchase. Several of our family have received Texas Land Heritage Certificate.
My extended family still works the land around here. Very few actually farm, it is mostly beef and hunting leases. The same thing that plays out all over the country is playing out here. A few of my Dad’s generation stayed & worked the land. A much smaller number of their kids stayed & worked the land choosing to move to the ‘city’. Then the kids of that generation then move to a bigger city.
Another interesting side note. If you follow TX-72 north along that road is an old uranium mine. When you are driving along all of a sudden you have security fencing (barbed wire long the top) all along the road with ‘government property keep out’ every few feet. The entire area is secured off because of residual radiation. The mine was more or less in the center of the plot & when they were done the government bought all the surrounding land for a buffer zone.
Mohagan
OMG Crater Lake is beautiful, and what a great picture! Many thanks to everyone for their photos. Happy 4th – “the Glorious Fourth”, as my mother used to say.
Aleta
@Lee: Thanks for the family-land story that goes with the photo. And the side story, the kids who stay and the kids who leave, and the widening out. So familiar, and the piece of land in the center.
All these fantastic photos. I love this community view.
@BroD: Re The New World Order from My back yard in Baltimore
This picture really moves me, besides being riveting.
J R in WV
OK, I’m [ETA, Really really curious!!] curious, what is going on in the bottom picture? What is hanging from those cylinders? There’s pretty obviously a party or fair of some kind in the distance, but those frameworks in the left foreground are quite odd, I can’t even guess what’s going on there.
Another Scott
@J R in WV: “Tree Logic”.
:-)
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
Well thanks!! Brilliant stuff there…
BroD
Thanks for all the kind comments on the vulture photo! I have a dead White Oak* out back which is used by all sorts of (mostly more attractive) birds so I have a camera & 600mm lens set up semi-permanently on the porch. For more birds go here
* It died about 10 years ago: oak is an amazing material!
Getting that photo was a sort of watershed (“Yes, that’s what it’s about!”) moment in my post-election funk, helping me to move on to active resistance. It seems particularly appropriate now in anticipation of the planned Trump/Putin G20 meeting.