Small Town Downtown

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Photo #311: Woody Point DowntownLocation Taken: Woody Point, Newfoundland, Canada
Time Taken: July 2012

I don’t have anything specific to say about this photo, I just came across it while looking for one to post and decided I had to share it right away.

It’s a magnificent picture of a small coastal town in Newfoundland. And, being a tough-to-reach far northern province, well, small is the right term. Though this was one of the larger towns in the area. Mind you, you can see half of the downtown (really, this is a bunch of shops and a tavern and the like, not homes! Well, maybe that one’s a home.) just in this photo. And really, if the town has more than two hundred buildings, I’d be surprised.

And this is with the town being in a “hot” tourist spot, right in the center of a gorgeous National Park!

There’s actually about eight or so small towns scattered throughout Gros Morne National Park. The towns were there first, you see. And when the park was created, well, they let the towns keep the land they were on.

Which is useful to the tourists, since the towns provide a place to find something to eat. And there’s a ferry across the fjord that cuts the park in two, from this town actually, which reduces travel times nicely. It’s not a car ferry, but it still is great for people who want to go hiking or exploring across the fjord.

And the locals can keep on fishing and selling things to the tourists, all while living surrounded by beautiful mountains.

Doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all.

  

I’m Feeling a Little Batty Today….

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Photo #310: Shawn FanartTime Drawn: October 2008

A few years ago, my sister had a webcomic called New Moon Rising. It’s dead now, but it’s still online if you want to read it. She’s a pretty good story teller, so it’s worth at least a look. I think she had to stop it due to the added workload of graduate school, and these days she just does straight writing rather than comics.

Still, at one point she needed Guest Art to fill in a gap where she knew she wouldn’t be able to update. I don’t fully remember why, but given that I drew it only a couple months after she started grad school, I have my guesses.

This is one of her characters from the comic, Shawn. He’s got healing magic, and the story is set in a cave, so showing him healing a bat made sense.

Besides, I like bats. They’re cute little flying fluffballs. I love it when I hear them flying around. There’s a few that live down by the river by my house and come up to the areas in town that are lit up at night to eat the bugs the light attracts. I have to be out walking at night to encounter them, but it’s still awesome every time I do.

  

The Powerful Beauty of a Sunrise

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Photo #309: Pawnee SunriseLocation Taken: Pawnee Lake State Recreation Area, Nebraska
Time Taken: November 2012

I’ve had this up as my computer wallpaper for a few days, and am really liking it there, so I might as well post it here too.

It was actually kinda interesting, how when I was setting up the operating system and the like on this computer, it didn’t feel like MY computer until I changed the wallpaper. No matter what programs I had installed, or settings I’d changed, just putting that one specific personalization choice made all the difference.

…This may be related to the fact that the overly bright and cheerful daisy picture that Windows 8 defaults to was slowly driving me mad…

Give me beautiful sunrises full of gold and black any day. Though as fantastic as this photo is, it still doesn’t quite beat waking up after a cold night camping in Nebraska in November to see this magnificent sunrise warming the sky.

  

Wreckhouse Wind-Carved Hills

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Photo #308: Wreckhouse HillsLocation Taken: Just north of Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

I’ve had a long day today, but then any day that includes you driving for five hours AND staying up for 22 hours straight is a long day, so don’t expect a massive essay today.

Instead, expect the marvelous wind-chiseled hills of Southwestern Newfoundland.

Seriously, the winds here are killer. Well, ok, I don’t know if any of the vehicles blown off the road or trains derailed by the wind involved fatalities, but there’s a reason this stretch of land is know as the “Wreckhouse”.

And just look at this picture. Not a tree to be seen, and trust me, it’s not because the land’s too cold or rocky for trees. Plants just get ripped to shreds if they grow too tall and rigid in areas that regularly get 70 mph winds.

It’s the fault of the geography, really. If you turned 180 degrees from where this photo was taken, you’d see the ocean. Well, ok, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Even regular ocean winds caused by daily heating differentials between land and sea are pretty strong, certainly enough to drag sand inland for dozen of yards. And the Gulf is a different beast. You’ve got warm freshwater coming in from the St. Lawrence, which drains the Great Lakes. There’s a major cold seawater current, the Labrador Current, that goes around the eastern side of Newfoundland. This means that the gulf is the mixture between two temperatures AND two salinities, both of which cause really interesting heating patterns. And heat differentials are what cause wind, as the air moves from areas of high pressure (usually caused by warm air) to areas of low (usually from cold air).

Then toss in the fact that this area gets hit by pretty much every major storm front that passes across North America. And combine that atmospheric instability with the regular geographic instabilities to get REALLY fun weather!

They still have to occasionally close this particular stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway to truck traffic when the winds get high. And it’s literally the only road between the port at Channel-Port aux Basques and the rest of Newfoundland, so those trucks get stuck.

And they can’t even look at these gorgeous hills while they’re waiting.

Huh, look at that, I DID write a massive essay…

  

A Lovely Day to Be Above the Beach

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Photo #307: False BeachLocation Taken: Somewhere above, I dunno, North Carolina?
Time Taken: October 2012

Isn’t this a lovely photo?

Such a fantastic shot of a shoreline taken from above, with the sand and distant trees going to the horizon and the white waves coming in. And the sky only has a few high clouds, too! It looks like a fantastic day at the beach, really…

Wait, it’s not a beach?

That “ocean” is an airplane wing?!

But I can see the waves – oh wait, that’s the flaps on the edge of the wing and some reflections.

But the shore – no, that’s the tops of some other clouds, low-laying ones the plane is far above. It’s only sand-colored because it’s sunset and the light just happens to be that color right at that time of day.  I think we were actually close by the Appalachians at that point, and they were causing the interesting variance in the clouds.

Don’t you love optical illusions?