Side Trips
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Today will be a full day for me. I will be getting started before dawn up to Lubbock to meet up with some of the KCBD team, gonna decorate my chase vehicle which is going to drive in the parade along with Steve Miller TX and his chase vehicle representing NewChannel 11 in full storm chaser gear.
The parade is in downtown Lubbock and starts at 9 a.m. Central time. I am doing something a little out of the ordinary, and will be streaming video from the dash from inside the parade. Over 150,000 spectators are expected at the parade, and you can ride along with us and see what it’s like to ride in a fairly big parade on the LIVE ChaseCam. Again, it starts at 9 a.m. Central, but I will probably fire it up once we get in the staging area so you can see some of the behind the scenes stuff.
Not sure what all I will be doing during the day, but in the evening a free concert featuring Mac Davis will be held in the park prior to the fireworks. The plan right now, assuming I can get a fairly secure staging position and someone to watch the laptop, is to stream the fireworks, which I expect will start sometime between 9 and 10 p.m. Central when it starts getting dark. I would start watching for the LIVE cam to actually go live sometime around 8 p.m. Central. Hopefully I can bring you guys a pretty good fireworks show for those that stayed in tonight. I am going to try real hard anyway. If I can tag into some broadband, I’ll also be trying to send audio as well as the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra.
By all means, leave a comment and let me know if your going to be watching or if you did watch!
Written by David on July 4th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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Mother nature threw a few lemons at us the other day sending the main jet to the north and the subtropical jet to the south and leaving us stuck in between with no upper level support to get our dryline storms fired off. As we mentioned, we went after those storms developing there, but they never did much and we never could really catch it. Was just moving too fast.
So we decided to do like we always do and make the best of it with a side trip for some photography. We ended up in Alvord, TX. A small down northwest of Ft. Worth where my parents grew up. My dad is buried there, along with both sets of grandparents. This is the first time I have been back there in a very long time. Took the chance to take many pictures around down, and of the headstones. Little changes over the years in a town like that.
Graham got some really cool pics there, especially of main street…all 2 blocks of it. Practically looks the same as it did decades ago. Once he gets through tweaking them I’ll see about posting a couple.
We then headed to nearby Decatur, which is much larger and had some places to eat. But first we stopped off downtown to take some pictures of their very unique and historic courthouse. I was getting some lessons from Graham on using my new Canon Rebel XTI camera and night photography. Here are some of my first night shots and first attempts and post work on a photo. Lemonade from lemons…
Written by David on April 5th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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And now for something completely different…
In rare form, I unplugged from most of the world for a change and headed down to Lake Alan Henry this weekend when Steve Miller called me up on a spur-of-the-moment fishing trip. This was the first trip to this lake for both of us. He has summed up the trip well in his blog so you can read more about that there. Steve is a great fisherman with plenty of experience. Me on the other hand, I am lucky if I ever catch anything, I just like to get out there for the peace and quiet and feed the fish expensive bait. This was a chance for Steve to teach me a thing or two about artificial bait fishing. I caught my first ever bass fish (2 smaller ones) and a couple of crazy perch, but it was fun! Steve did quite a bit better on the bass than I did however.
We also got in a lot of great hiking and exploring some back roads and hiking trails and found some really cool hidden away spots. One of our favorites was this huge cliff that dropped almost straight down into the water. I don’t know how high it was, but it was definitely HIGH! This is a view of it from the side…
And this was the view…STRAIGHT DOWN! Would have gotten a nasty scratch from falling off that!
We also saw a good sized rattle snake Steve has pics of over on his blog and in general had a nice relaxing time, despite the 300+ boats coming and going resulting in a huge traffic jam at the boat dock requiring Lubbock Police to sort it out. Despite the huge crowd, almost everyone was well behaved and we were able to hike back in to some area where most people didn’t tread. The nice thing too was we were able to scout out some great fishing spots from the shore that we want to take advantage of on a weekend that isn’t a holiday and less people around. There are also some GREAT primitive camping sites that are spaced out enough among the ample vegetation to give you plenty of privacy. I am looking forward to another trip there despite my attempted recovery today from Ultra Violet Radiation Poisoning!
Written by David on September 3rd, 2007 with 5 comments.
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