There’s no place in England I haven’t found beautiful. I’ve only seen parts of it, of course, but would love to visit more areas. Gothic cathedrals and abbeys are a favourite of mine, and England has so many. Wells Cathedral is probably the one I like best (of the ones I’ve seen so far).
Is that a challenge?
In the upper right you can just barely make out part of the dipper constellation as it emerged through the clouds framed by various oaks, hickories and pines.
This is really a cheat since it is a video and not one I took. But for @Realspiritik, @LM77 and @Randy who like me seem quite smitten by english gardens here is my favorite. A private garden and the last garden we visited in the summer of 2008. Tony was a doctor, like you Randy, and Marie a hospital administrator. (Don’t worry, they’re not dead - just retired.) After their kids grew up their weekends and holidays went into making this garden which blows me away in any season but here it is this past fall as filmed by a local television station. I was fortunate to be able to visit them without waiting for one of their open days because we’d been exchanging photos of our gardens for years before that.
This is a photo I took of some fox lilies in their garden combined with a photo Tony sent me of me taking that photo.
One more taken by Tony of Marie, Lia and I having tea … which turns out to include a little more than a cuppa.
An extraordinary garden with so many colours. Thanks for sharing this!
Grays, where I live.
I regularly see seals where I live, when walking along the river. Can’t get a good picture though, as it is always from a distance.
@Laura, this one is for you for sharing your snow with me. I just took it this morning in the back garden.
I might mention that there are quite a few lovely photographs of God’s creation at God and Nature magazine. The latest (Winter 2020) issue has 4 by Thomas Jay Oord (with theological commentary) and three others with Haiku style poetry. (Declare the Glory).
I ran across this one today, but there was no annotation – maybe it’s in Wales? It was first published, as far as I can tell using a Google image search, in an article, Britain’s best poetry walks.
When my family was young, we spent many summer vacations hiking all over there. My right knee has explicitly told me that those days are over. (I could probably still manage a stroll around Bear Lake.) It’s also fun to see the elk filling the church’s parking lot in Estes on a Saturday night in September or October.
Yeah, that was just above Bear Lake – somewhere on the trail to Emerald Lake.
Postcard perfect, Steve. I was in the area in August of 2017 to see the eclipse. Stayed with my aunt in Greer, SC at her house on a lake where I got to see a nice sun up every morning.
We visited other cousins in Greenville which has lots of natural beauty right down town.
Later we drove up to Asheville NC and on the way back we drove back in a direction that took us through a part of Rocky Mountain NP. Very picturesque and our dinner at one of the lodges was good even though it required quite a wait. Plenty to see from there at least. I didn’t seem to get any photos though sadly.
We saw the eclipse at a public park between Greer and Greenville but the photos are nothing special.
Our last family vacation was after the boys were in college and it had been a couple of years since the previous. I had a different job and was not commuting on my bicycle nor taking the stairs all over a five-story hospital any more, and I was way out of shape. We had gone up Flat Top and Hallett as prep for Long’s to be early the next morning, but just after starting to come down from Hallett my knee said “That’s all!” I was thankful for strong teen shoulders to bear weight the rest of the way down. (Half a century ago, the ortho doc had removed my right lateral meniscus – in the days before shaving or suturing.) The boys went up Long’s without me.
Nice! That was quite a trip!
It was really nice in a lot of ways, Dale. Definitely had a good visit with lots of family I rarely see. One of my cousins is quite a gardner and his wife even more so. She gardens for butterflies and I loved what she’d done. My cousin cultivates the food crops, not my cup of tea but he was good at it. Played a lot of old family card games.
We went to Asheville to see an art gallery my wife was interested in. We signed in and were just getting ready to leave the area when Lia got a call from a friend we stay with when we’re in D.C. They had also come down for the eclipse with their son and granddaughter so we met up for lunch. The eclipse itself was spectacular with more than 2 minutes of totality. The difference between an eclipse and a total eclipse is huge.