We just got back from another vacation! This time we spent a week in Seattle, with a stop of a couple of days in Monterey, CA first. These pictures are from the first day of our trip, when we arrived in Monterey. But first we had to go through the Altamont Pass Wind Farm.

And of course no long drive is complete without a pit stop for frozen yogurt!

Finally we arrived in Monterey, and our first stop was the Dennis the Menace Playground.

One of the cool things about this park is that they have an actual steam locomotive that the kids can crawl all over. It was fenced off for renovations, though. This made our kids sad.

After the park, we hit the beach. It was kind of a chilly afternoon, but that didn’t stop Sam from stripping down and running right into the waves. Ali was smart enough to bring a swimsuit.

After that, it was back to the hotel to get ready for a big day tomorrow!

For dinner we found an English pub nearby. All the mugs on the ceiling were meant for the regulars. When you come in, they bring down your mug and fill it up.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been excited about a new phone book coming out. I pick up the phone book maybe three times a year, for those few rare things that it does more efficiently than Google. But if there’s one thing that you could do to get me excited about the phone book again, they did it.

They put my photograph on the cover.

Early last year they reached out to me to submit some photos for consideration. They always try to stick to local photographers, and the work I do here at Around Carson caught their eye. So I went around the area trying to find something that could represent Carson City. I photographed deer running on the west side, I took pictures of the Capitol and the Laxalt Building, I got snow and pogonip and expansive skies. But then I remembered this lonely flag along Hwy 50 heading up to Spooner Summit. Someone put this flag up a few years ago and I always wanted to stop and get a photo, but it’s tough to stop along that stretch of highway. Last winter the flag disappeared and I thought I lost my chance, but when summer came around it came back. So it’s not just some forgotten flag; it’s kept up by somebody. I finally did pull over along the highway and took some photos, mainly to capture an image of the flag in case it ever went away again, but also in the back of my mind I was framing the shots so they would look good on the cover of a phone book. You know, just in case.

Fast forward a few months, and what do you know, the flag was the one they liked best. I think it works well for a cover photo, much better than last year’s dismal shot, that’s for sure.

All these times we’ve been going to Lake Tahoe we’ve always had to be so careful with our cameras, making sure they stay on shore and don’t get near the water. But this year we actually have a camera that we don’t have to be afraid of taking out on the water, so we’re able to get actual action shots from out on the water. The image quality isn’t the best (especially on the video – ouch!), but it’s better than not having these pictures at all.

This summer our big family trip was to spend two weeks at Disneyland. On a trip like this you take a lot of pictures, and then, as I’m finding out, when you get home it takes a long time to go through and process them all. So that’s why I’m here, six weeks after the end of the vacation, finally posting the first set of photos. Hooray for procrastination!

As usual, more pictures can be found at Flickr. And let’s hope that it doesn’t take another size weeks to go through the second set.

These aren’t the best eagle photos around, but the only nest nearby is way far away from the road, and access to the land is restricted. So this is about the best I could do, even with a telephoto.

Just a few photos from a cold trip up to Lake Tahoe last month.