Close up of the light fixture from the "hidden" path I posted yesterday.

We spent a day in Minneapolis on our way to Michigan exploring our old haunts. We went down to the riverfront to find a "hidden" path we had found a year before. In the middle of a vine covered chain link fence there is a doorway that you won't notice if you weren't looking for it.

We continued to walk down the path winding between the smoke stacks on metal grating holding us a couple stories in the air.

A strange intersection.

Spiderwebs were all around the light waiting for nightfall I suppose. This is still on the path from the following days.

Leaves in the driveway of Isabel and Brad's house on 8.13.02..

Sunrise through some weeds outside of work this morning.

Telephone poles trailing off into the distance on Chamness trail (in Illinois) this summer.

Quick shot of the fire hydrant in the work parking lot with a new 20mm. Looked like one of those mushroom guys from Fantasia with chain handcuffs on to me.

The tracks were a source of constant adventure when I was a kid. Fueled by the inspiration of movies like The Goonies I crawled down or in every hole in the ground and through every tunnel. I never found Sloth or any pirate's treasure, but I certainly had adventures all my own and found turtle shells and pretty enough rocks.

p.s.

I grew up next to a liquor store that sold bait for fishing at the Lake of Egypt. The store even had a couple large tanks out in the back of it where it kept some of the fish along with snapping turtles the owner liked to eat. I used to sit as a kid and look into the dark water and see a school of glowing eyes swarming and looking up at me. It was common to find dead fish along drainage ditches and water holes that fishermen had discarded on their way home from the lake.

Something in the trees had reminded me that I always felt like I was silently screaming back then in a way ordinary people couldn't hear. Those screams seem to have not stayed with me, but with that place. When I go back there I hear them through my attachment to it even though I have become one of those ordinary people.

When I remember being that person and being in that situation, my life is easy to appreciate. It is the gift of then. The effect of standing there so many years later was to look at myself and realize.... I did it. I had survived, escaped and defined myself. I have achieved something mundane and ordinary, but extraordinary to the kid back then.

In a few hours we are off to Minnesota for the holidays. I was thinking about it all morning and checked prices again (which dropped) and decided to take the train. I loved it last time I went. It is definitely an experience everyone should have at least once. I kept thinking Ocala would love it. So we switched around the tickets today. : ) A train ride through the Rockies and across the snowy plains of Montana and North Dakota here we come. This is a shot from last year when I went.

Ah, figured out how to get images to my server from here. So here are a couple of images showing the contrast between the West and East sides of Montana.

Passing by the scenery at 80 miles an hour is a lesson in camera control. : )