Wow.
We’re home after a week in Colorado. It’s a beautiful place to visit and life just seems to move along at a different pace.
Most of our time was spent in the Boulder vicinity and the nearby Flatirons. I’ll share more about our trip in the near future- for now here’s a slideshow for your visual enjoyment…
http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=109615
Just returned from my second trek to the Great Chicken Rally in Huntsville, Alabama.
I still prefer the old “Rocket City Rally” name because it fits in with the city so much better. The space museum and much of the architecture play tribute to the role Huntsville played in the American space program and still plays in high-tech ballistics. But they do cook up a huge amount of chicken!
In the Golden Age of Fiberglass there were a variety of RV manufacturers that took advantage of the light weight and easy to mold plastic to build motorhomes. They borrowed their engines and chassis from Corvairs, Oldsmobile Toronados and everything in between. Many of these efforts were quite forgettable.
The retro styling and mobile party bus aspect of these behemoths has spurred a small boom of RV restorations.
But one of the more noticeable shapes from this period was from a company called Travco. Short for “travelers company,” they used a Dodge truck frame and laid up a ton of ‘glass to produce these land yachts from the mid Sixties up into the Eighties.
Recently I discovered a blog about one Travco that has been lovingly restored by a couple in Canada. Today it travels the country to compete in RV and vintage trailer shows (yes, there really is such a thing). The 1964 example is affectionately known as Myrtle and is a painted aqua blue that immediately reminded me of our local Blue Whale. The blog chronicles the adventures of restoring a blue whale made of fiberglass, wood and steel.
Click here to follow the Adventures of Myrtle…
Google Maps latest Street View addition isn’t a street at all. It’s the massive Amazon forest in Brazil!
The images, from August 2011, document life in the Rio Negro Reserve.
Read more about the project at
Capturing the Amazon with Street View.
I recently discovered a unique archive of photographs. They are the work of a man named Nick De Wolfe.
I had never heard of Mr. De Wolfe, but suffice to say he was quite an interesting man. He snapped a lot of pictures throughout his life, and was one hell of a photographer. The voluminous stacks, accumulated over a lifetime, are currently being scanned by De Wolfe’s son-in-law, Steve Lundeen.
I was fascinated paging through the images from all over the world- some from places I have visited. One of the more interesting sets involves a vacation trip from New York to Stockholm in 1959. For highlights and a wonderful explanation of this unique archive visit A Continuous Lean.
Or view the entire collection on Flickr…