The Grand Canyon, Pennsylvania-style

Deb and I decided to plan a little holiday roadtrip to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon near Wellsboro on Dec 28, when this post was written (but I couldn't load photos until today, Jan 2). Em came, and Deb's daughter came, but Kat's back was acting up so she had to stay home.

The drive up there was eventful because of (a) the fact that I'd never been that far north in PA, and (b) the lack of places to pull over to get coffee. We passed a sign for a Sheetz (a PA-area convenience store) but we never saw the place. We ended up stopping at this great little roadside cafe and loading up on coffee, PB and cheese crackers (a work staple for me, Niki, and Deb), and other assorted goodies. Then we finally made it to the West Rim of the Grand Canyon. The photo above is probably the best one I took of the canyon; the sky was overcast, with the muted sun flaring out the water in most of my photos.

We only went up to the West Rim; it was pretty cold that day, and the girls tired pretty quickly. There were no birds at all, anywhere, that I could see or hear. It was really quiet up there but for a stiff and gusty wind in the trees.

I took a few other photos. Some deer in pen, for some mysterious reason--pets? deer farm? I don't know. There were no signs; just some jailbirds (jaildeer?) looking pretty upset that we were taking their pictures but not offering any food.


A macro shot of a hemlock cone:


A little touch of Andy Goldsworthy, created by nature (or something really heavy):


A weird little lichen or moss or something--alien message?--growing on limestone:


A very disturbing vending machine:

I shudder at the thought that this machine has live fish in it, sitting there in little tanks I guess, waiting for someone to put a dollar in there and (ugh) dispense.

And finally a photo of the trees with the very light snowfall, the most snow I've seen all season so far:


Here's the setting sun that got us home again:


This new version of Blogger is okay, but for some reason I still don't see all the buttons (formatting, embedded links, etc.) at the top of the post window when I'm on my Mac. ? Also, instead of showing the actual photos in the edit mode, I only see the HTML. Perhaps I set a preference wrong? Probably. I'll have to check.

So I set the post time and date of this to occur on the night I originally wanted to post it--the night after we went on this trip. I don't know if Blogger will backdate it or not. We'll see.