Tag: travel

by jad

#Route101: Reedsport / North Bend / Mapleton

We stopped here on our way to Portland on December 30, purely to take that photo in the last slide, but ended up leaving with some mini cakes and a big ol’ jar of blackberry High Country Honey from Lakeside, OR. It was a little sad to see all these shuttered and vacant stores lining both sides of main street, sandwiched between hokey MAGA wood art and a cute little “bakery & coffee shop” that didn’t sell coffee. It felt like a poetic aperçu of this place. x This was where we spent most of the morning of New Year’s … Continue reading “#Route101: Reedsport / North Bend / Mapleton” →

by jad

#Route101: Olympia / PDX / Lebanon

Olympia was a pit stop and packed lunch break at the start of our #Route101 road trip. This was my second time here but my first time passing through downtown; we’d only visited the state capitol area last time. I think it was just as grey and dreary then too. These were taken on the same #FujifilmSuperia400 roll I took with me to Bellingham on Thanksgiving break, but for some reason my #NikonN60 auto-wound it after only two shots. I got a film picker to salvage it later and you can see the accidental double-exposure in the last two slides from when it didn’t quite line … Continue reading “#Route101: Olympia / PDX / Lebanon” →

by jad

#Route101: Eureka, CA to Portland, OR

More photos from my phone of our #Route101 road trip, before I develop my rolls of film. These sum up #EurekaCA to #PortlandOR: 1. Mural in Eureka, CA. I’d like to think that this is the California bear at his government job being a flag. 2. In-N-Out Burger in Eureka where I asked a server “how was the storm for ya” and he gave me a bumper sticker. 3. Mural in Napa, CA. I had the best shrimp and grits here. 4. Mural of SF at a gas station/burger stand in Hopland, CA. This was a bathroom break. 5. Our motel in Coos Bay, OR, … Continue reading “#Route101: Eureka, CA to Portland, OR” →

by jad

#Route101: Olympia, WA to Shelter Cove, WA

I shot four rolls of film on our #Route101 road trip and probably won’t get a chance to drop them off to be developed before Friday, which is fine, as that’s the 12th day of Christmas. But I’m expecting a post-holiday crunch so the scans might not even be ready for weeks… So in the meantime, here are more shots off my phone, summing up the journey from #OlympiaWA to #ShelterCoveCA: 1. Shipping container at Northpoint, Port of Olympia. We ended up here by mistake. 2. Storefront in Lebanon, OR. This town is a lot cuter than I’d expected. 3. Coke machine at our motel … Continue reading “#Route101: Olympia, WA to Shelter Cove, WA” →

by jad

#Route101: PDX-SF-Eureka

Dearest, I am writing to you from #EurekaCA after Christine heroically drove us through here, from Seattle to San Francisco, and back again, on #Route101. It has been a doozy. I’ll have more to say about it all in subsequent missives to you, good friend, but in the meantime, here are some unedited, straight out of the camera digital shots I took along the way on our first time down the coast, using that #HolgaLens I’m loving so much. Oo yeah, Californi-yay. x x One of the more memorable stops along the way was Shelter Cove. We knew it had a brewery that claimed to … Continue reading “#Route101: PDX-SF-Eureka” →

by jad

AdventWord 2022—TRAVELER

Today’s #AdventWord is TRAVELER, and for the longest time, I’ve been fixated on a phrase that came to me repurposed from an album title, a phrase that became a kind of philosophy of life in molecular form: “I am traveling with another.” I ran that through a readability analyzer and it apparently corresponds to a 10th/12th grade level, which makes sense, because in many ways it captures a high school senior’s style of overthinking the world. Like an essay about serendipity that compares the concept to looking over the school yard fence and noticing a storybook style house you describe like a … Continue reading “AdventWord 2022—TRAVELER” →

by jad

An Alright Journey

‎الى اين‎بين النهرين‎بين سطرين‎لا يهم و نمشي ‎الى متى‎سار الفتى‎اين اتى‎لا يهم و نمشي x his is Christine holding a Polaroid we took earlier, outside the USCIS building where I got quizzed on civics, could not recall my social security number, and renounced all loyalty and fidelity to any prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, except that of these United States, so help me God. I like to think of it as an ad hoc aura photo of my total ontological reconstitution in this civil rite of baptism. Blessed be. It was an expedited oathtaking ceremony to get through the backlog of … Continue reading “An Alright Journey” →

by jad

Trip Like I Do—Snoqualmie Falls, June 27

So here we are, back to the start; these iconic falls “where Heaven and Earth meet” were the very first stop on our itinerary, making these some of my very first photographs on the journey. I’d read about this sacred place and wanted to capture a little bit of how indigenous peoples might perceive these waters, these “mists that roll up to Heaven” and “carry our prayers and our hopes and our dreams to the Creator of us all,” in the words of Ernie Barr, Jr. My photos weren’t successful in the way I’d imagined them when I looked through … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—Snoqualmie Falls, June 27” →

by jad

Trip Like I Do—Secret Place, Idaho

A friend mentioned this place in a quick exchange as I was being eaten by mosquitos in the one spot with wifi in the whole of Priest Lake. When the mood turned sour in our immediate surroundings, Christine and I decided to head out here to spend the day somewhere totally unplanned, to catch our breath and reset; we were not disappointed. “It’s so unexpectedly nice,” I said to my friend, after asking her to guess where we are. “Exactly,” she replied and mentioned pickles. They have really good pickles here. Then she said: “Keep it a secret place…” No worries … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—Secret Place, Idaho” →

by jad

Trip Like I Do—E. Washington Roadscapes

x “I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvelously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which … Continue reading “Trip Like I Do—E. Washington Roadscapes” →