The beginning

Northern lights and a shooting star over Lake Superior. Taken from Middle River Beach on the Wisconsin shore, east of Superior, looking north toward the Minnesota shore, October 2007. 

I was driving on Highway 2, heading home after visiting my aunt and uncle's house near Ashland, when I saw the clear sky, and a hint of the northern lights. I decided to take a detour up to this beach, which is at the end of a long gravel road off Highway 13. I had been there on a 90+ degree day the previous summer when I had to get out of sweltering Duluth and picked it off a map. (Nice swimming beach, but the water is COLD.)

It was a cool night, and the beach, of course, was deserted; there are no houses nearby. As I often do in those circumstances, I psyched myself out imagining some criminal, or a bear, rushing out of the woods. But I stuck around long enough to get my tripod set up and snap a series of photos. I knew I got some good northern lights photos - the best display I had shot since leaving Alaska more than two years earlier - but I didn't realize until after I got home that I had caught a shooting star on this frame. That was the icing on the cake.

So begins this blog, started the day before my 30th birthday. I have a big archive of photos - some really good photos, in my opinion - that have been hidden away for far too long. I plan to share those photos and the stories behind them, as well as share some stories from adventures old and new as I travel, fix up my misfit house and in general try to make my way through the ever-changing world.