2021: Big Expectations

On our road trip in March 2021 we drove to the Cascades Mountain in Washington state hoping to see some interesting landscapes and rural life. Since we were exploring we took some off road turns to see what was on the other side and found some interesting things.

Somewhere along the way as we passed a small town we saw a sign or something alerting us to a small church up the road so I thought this would be an opportunity to get some door photos of a small church.

Driving with eyes peeled to find that small church I almost missed it and turned off the road and hit the brakes. We got out and started taking some photos which are shown below.

The lighting looked good filtering through the trees highlighting the church’s roof.

The church’s steeple was plain, consider the rural location as an explanation.

The great door of the chapel.

And to put things into perspective, the small church, Wildwood Chapel.

They weren’t kidding when they alerted people that a small church was up the road.

Sometimes we don’t take things literally when the say “small” and it was the size of a child’s playhouse, but it had a sizable green door!

So I hope your visits to the Thursday Doors features on the No Facilities website, hosted and managed by Dan Antion, keeps you surprised by what Dan and the other world class door bloggers will offer you each week. Be a contributor and share a surprise door or doors for others to see.

Thursday Doors 6/24/2021: Don’t Believe Everything You Read, Maybe

Last year our road trip home bypassed routes through Utah to get back to the Bay Area in California. We made a stop and looked around the landscape after looking at the sign detailing the history of the town of Baker and the Snake Valley.

I recall it was a small town and we focused on some old buildings but the sign said what a great place to call home. Well the photos didn’t give you the impression that it was a great place to call home.

If your home looked like this; I think there is a door in here somewhere.

There are some newer buildings but many old relics, too.

But up the road somewhere, I guess I changed my mind, a little when we saw the red barn with nice wooden doors.

This is my Thursday Doors contribution for this week. Be sure to visit Dan Antion’s No Facilities website where he hosts and manages the Thursday Doors blogs and take a trip around the world by seeing what other Thursday Doors contributors are offering from their parts of the world.

Thursday Doors 6/17/21: The Journey, Not the Destination

The old adage, it’s the journey and not the destination that holds some truth. We know where we want to be but it’s getting there that provides some interest.

Such is what is displayed in today’s Thursday Doors post. Last year we visited Idaho among other states and headed on the Sawtooth Mountain Scenic Byway in search of new adventures. Our first trip to this area and we saw some old wooden houses on a lot just off the road. We made a mental note to stop there later.

During the return trip I looked for the area we saw the wooden houses and pulled into the small dirt road. From the Byway we didn’t know it was a residential area but we were drawn to the old building. A man was collecting some fire wood next door and we asked if it would ok to take some photos and he told us that the big old building was empty and nobody would mind if we took some photos.

It turned out to be an old lodge that had seen better days but it was not habitable and the September evening was getting cooler so it needed a heat source if anyone stayed there but there was none (you can see the bent chimney stack on the roof). So here’s the building that caught my eye as we passed by in the morning and returned to on our way back to the house we rented in Twin Falls. It had a nice wooden door, a door that makes it qualify for the Thursday Doors weekly posts hosted by Dan Antion; Dan also manages the Thursday Door posts for other door bloggers from around the world. Be sure to visit his No Facilities website to sample the doors by others and post your own doors.

Here’s the lodge from a different perspective.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for stopping by.

Thursday Doors 6/10/2021: Doors Real and Sometimes Imagined

Today, I am trying to post my door contribution to Thursday Doors, the website created by Norm Frampton but now Managed by An Antion, at a reasonably “early time” (for me, anyway). Today, I will post a door from a little town called Silverton when we visited that location in October of 2020.

Silverton is located in the western San Juan Mountains of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. It was formed during the silver mining days and revived during the gold rush after having its ups and downs during the economic happenings of the era. Today it is a National Historic site and still has a small old western town. The details of its history can be read in Wikipedia (sorry for the shortcut history lesson) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverton,_Colorado

We drove past the town and passed mining properties and saw abandoned old buildings and equipment. We drove up a hillside trying to get to an old ghost town but the dusty old gravel, pitted and rock road was too narrow at some locations with big drops from the edge of the road that you needed a high suspension 4-wheel drive vehicle to get there. We had a 4-wheel drive SUV but it wasn’t high enough to dodge some of the rocks on the road so we decided to turn around at an area that looked too dangerous to proceed and didn’t reach that ghost town.

Along the way I got some photos of doors at the small town and abandoned mining buildings so I’ll feature an old building with at least two real doors. It looks usable and I wonder if it’s still in use.

Along the way the landscape was littered with old equipment. In this image, the door is gone from the truck but imagine what it looked like:

And, a bonus photo for your imagination with some words of wisdom, Watch for Deere Crossing:

Thank you for visiting this Thursday Doors post and please be sure to visit Dan Antion’s No Facilities website where he hosts and manages the Thursday Doors blogs for other door aficionados from around the world; and if you dare to participate, please add a door image of your own to share with the door watchers’ community.

Thursday Doors 6/3/2021: Waterfront Park

We spent a couple of days in Leavenworth, WA which is modeled like a little German town. I’ll show some photos of the town in another Thursday Doors post. In this post we hiked around the Waterfront Park which had a small loop trail with some nice scenery. I found a door worthy for this post in this area.

There was a lodge at the entrance to the trailhead from the town and that’s where I found a great wooden door. This was a side entrance to the Blackbird Lodge.

The lodge looked pretty big from across the the island that had the hiking trails; the island was developed not only to show a scenic park but it was also developed to protect the town from floods. The lodge as seen from the island looks like this.

One of the scenic views walking on the trails is a view of the snow capped mountains. I saw an Osprey flying over the river landing in a tree so that told me there was fish available in the river.

Thanks for stopping by to catch a view of the door and the snow capped mountain. Be sure to visit Dan Antion’s No Facilities website to see his Thursday Doors postings and those of other door bloggers that he hosts and manages.

Thursday Doors 5/27/2021: Doors in Dark Lighting Conditions

I had a couple of interesting scenes with barn doors but they were shot at dusk with poor lighting and the doors were not the main compositions but the overall image was worth sharing for this Thursday Doors edition.

The low lighting cause a lot of noise in the images and I used Topaz AI Denoise to reduce the noise but without adequate lighting many images turn out noisy.

This image was at sunset and the sun started its descent at the horizon but I was able to get details from the dark. The barn has some doors on.

The next image was shot in the community of Woodburn, OR after our sunset shoot at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm. We decided to explore the area because we had to get up early the next morning for our road trip home to California. The barn sat on a hillside and the sunset light cast some great lighting on the clouds. The barn was dark but I was able to pull out some detail of the barn doors.

Thank you for visiting my Thursday Doors entries for this week. Please visit Dan Antion’s No Facilities website to see what kinds of things Dan is cooking up this week and look for the Thursday Doors postings that he posts and manages for other Thursday Doors bloggers from all parts of the world for their contributions.

Thursday Doors 5/20/2021: When Life Gives You Lemons

I’ve heard that phrase many times and that ques up the beginning of this short Thursday Doors post. My restart of Thursday Doors blogging was based on my recent trip to Washington state and continues with that theme for the time being.

One late afternoon we explored some of the back roads of La Conner that had many farm fields and sometimes barns that we could photograph without trespassing. We came upon this little stand on the corner of the road but since it was late no was around it. The picture is self explanatory about the title of this post. The added bonus was the background tree and the bicycle leaning against the Lemonade stand.

Now to make this post qualify for the Thursday Doors requirements we found this beautiful barn up the road with some great barn doors.

If you’re interested in seeing more doors from various locations around the world please visit Dan Antion’s “No Facilities” website where he hosts and manages the Thursday Doors contributors’ blogs and his own witty and picturesque door photos.

Thanks for visiting this week and I’m hoping to process more images for the coming weeks.

Thursday Doors 5/13/2021: Small Town in the Skagit Valley

The recent road trip I took had the goal of finding the daffodils and tulips as they bloomed in the spring at the notable fields in the Washington Skagit Valley. The trip was fruitful as we got to see the daffodils blooming when we arrived but the tulips were just sprouts of green leaves in the ground in the very cold weather and we had doubts that they would grow up and bloom into the tulips we see in flower stores within a couple of weeks.

We had tickets to the RoozenGaarde farm for the daffodils when we arrived at our rental house and this is what we got to see. The fields where the tulips would germinate looked bare and we wondered if we would miss the event if they did not grow and bloom before we had to leave in a few weeks.

Flash forward a few weeks and it was the day before our scheduled time to leave for our next destination. We had heard the tulips finally started to bloom and we were amazed at how fast they could grown in the cold weather.

Our tickets to see the tulips was for the evening sunset viewing so we drove to La Conner where the tulip fields were and where the RoozenGaarde farm was located but it was early so we decided to explore a bit. We found the little harbor town of La Conner and wished we had explored this place earlier during the three weeks we were there. I just looked at the Wikipedia information about the town and learned it was given historic status and the census was about 891 people in the 2010 census. You can see some the Wikipedia information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Conner,_Washington

Here are a couple of doors in the town of La Connor for the Thursday Doors post. I still have to process the other photos from this town but I only had a half an hour to do a quick walk around to find some interesting doors to photograph so I’ll add more photos next time.

The Kayak Rental Booth at the End of the Town

A newer building with some historical information in newspaper postings (the doors are modern).

Some History Postings of this Town on the Newer Building

And to conclude this episode of the Thursday Doors post, which you can see more of by visiting Dan Antion’s No Facilities website where he also hosts and manages the Thursday Door posts from other door bloggers from all over the world, a sunset image of the long awaited RoozenGaarde tulip fields.

Thanks for dropping by and checking out my door blog for this week. I hope to get more door images edited and posted as time permits.

Thursday Doors: 5/6/2021 Reopening Doors

Wow, my last post was on the 3/18/2021 Thursday Doors and I’ve been out of touch for awhile. I’m sorry for the inactivity as I took a road trip to Washington State for almost a month. We had a great time renting a house in a small city called Anacortes and used that as home base for a few weeks before moving on to other locations.

The original plans for this trip was to visit the farms that displayed their daffodil and tulip blooms for the spring but it turned out to be much more than I anticipated. The spring time weather up north was cool, very much like the cool weather in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we kept our social distancing protocols because my wife wasn’t able to get her COVID vaccination before we left for this trip.

The house we rented included bird and squirrel feeders in the yard and daily deer visitors because the owner made it a daily routine to put out feed for the deer; every morning we woke up to see the hummingbirds feeding near the dinning room window and the packs of deer looking for their food and domesticated rabbits that were left to roam the yards on their own. And then, there were the bald eagles that we were lucky to see all over the neighborhoods or rural areas that we visited.

For this Thursday Doors post, I am showing an old barn we found in the nearby town of La Conner. Old barns dotted the landscape but many were on private properties so we couldn’t get close enough to get those photos. This one was abandoned beside the roadside and we had some good cloud formations on that day. The old barn doors were a great find!

I’m still working on photos from this trip and when I get some door photos processed I’ll feature them in future Thursday Door posts. If you’re looking for world class photos of doors posted by world class door aficionados, please visit Dan Antion’s No Facilities website where he manages the Thursday Doors blogs and posts some of the best features about doors and their history.

The surprise part of my road trip was it also turned out to be one of the best birding adventures I have experienced. I shot photos of the owl below and went back to that location several times and saw it hunting and at times with two other owls. There were also bald eagles and harrier hawks there and on the last visit I also saw a weasel running across the road in my rearview mirror but I didn’t get that shot. I shot a photo of the owl below and not knowing the species I contacted our resident birding expert and Thursday Door blogger, Deborah, to learn what kind of owl it was. Her quick research suggested that it was a Short Ear Owl and I later learned it was a cousin of the Hawaiian Owl called a Pueo.

I’m going to end this post here and I hope to post more door photos from this trip along with some other photos of interest.

Thursday Doors: 3/18/2021 Erfoud, Morocco

My last post, apologies that I have not added anything for a few weeks, took you to our arrival to Erfoud. I looked for some doors that may have preceded our arrival there but most of my shots were taken from our tour bus passing the nomadic Berbers tending their sheep and the doors were mostly of tents. However we did pass through the Atlas Mountains and through the community of Ifrane which had university and ski resort area as I recall, with very modern expensive looking buildings (sorry no doors were found of interest there during our rest stop). The temperature was very cool so we were at a high elevation.

This was the building of the Hotel Le Charmonix in Ifrane.

Sorry no door on this tent.

But this structure had a utilitarian door

And as we passed this village we could see the snow covered mountains in the background, it was too far to feature any doors in this shot.

After arriving at Erfoud my last post showed the doors from a mosque. But after visiting that mosque we stopped at a fossil factory to learn and see how they find slabs of rocks with fossils embedded in them and how they extracted the fossils to make decorations and furnishings. This is where I found a couple of noteworthy doors.

This is a slab of rock with fossils that they were extracting by chipping away the rock to expose the fossils in 3-D.

While I am still editing my photos and finding more doors to post I’ll end this post with a shot of the camel ride tour we took in the Sahara Desert during sunset which was the end of this tour stop.

Thanks for visiting; please check out Dan Antion’s No Facilities site where he hosts the Thursday Doors posts.