Hello, I am Fall and I Am Cool!

OK, so I really should be grading student papers right now, but I think I will avoid it a bit longer by blogging! :)  A couple weeks ago Courtney and I had the chance to head up to near Salt Point, NY to visit with some family (new family for me!) and go to their home winery bottling party!  More on the party is here.  Fall was starting in up north and we got to see some great foliage.  This little guy was just outside one of our friends' house and I fell in love with it.  No idea what type of plant it is but I love the way the leaves changes in stripes!  Most Cool Fall!!

More Smokies Goodness

Pretty Butterfly near the Odgen house in Cades Cove.
The old Odgen home. I love the dove tail joints here. They have stood for over 100 years and likely will a hundred more!
I love the mix of all of the stages of fall here...green, yellow, and red!!!
Fungi....everywhere!
Just a really darned cool leaf
Here are some more goodies from the Smokies a couple of weeks ago :)

Fall Is Here

Well, it is here if here is the Great Smokey National Park. It was 85 in Atlanta today...not really Fall if you ask me!!! My parents are in town though so I took them on up to the Smokies to go leaf watching. At it was incredible!!! Fall has arrive up in the mountains (as well as WAY too many people in Gatlinburg. Wow, that town in scary!) and we traveled for four days (Courtney joined us for 2 of those days) and we saw many a leaf changing color and took even more pictures. All four of us had cameras and I think that at times we may have all even taken the same picture :) These three picture are to start you out in the Fall Feast and were all taken the last day. I was really happy to actually see the 'smokey' aspect to the Smokies in the middle picture. So often the smog limits visibility but real really lucked out. You could see out in the direction of Pigeon Forge that the smog was definitely there but it in most of the other directions the view was incredible. It was much clearer this year than last year when Courtney and I visited over Labor Day. More people too!

Don't Trip, See You Next Fall

Purdue in 1994. This was my first Fall in Indiana and I loved all of the color. I am a California boy and yes, we do get winters there and it even snowed in Walnut Creek (where I grew up) 4 times in the 20 something years my family lived there. Usually we even got below freezing several times a winter. However, we just don't have as many trees that change such purty colors in the fall. I often just headed around town looking at these gorgeous trees that were probably 50-60 feet high and really impressive all decked out in colors. I found that if I included some blue sky it added a great contrast to really accentuate the colors of the foliage.