Welcome to my vacation pictures, part 2 (of 3). You can see my London highlights in this post. We spent three days in Cambridge, and most of the time I was busy attending a conference. So, I didn't get to do that much sightseeing. I did see some of the major sites, though:
We saw lots of people punting on the river, of course. And we visited a few of the colleges, including St. John's, which has a beautiful chapel and their own version of the Bridge of Sighs:
Cambridge is a University town, with a couple of nice shopping/eating streets surrounded by various "colleges." Access to the colleges is somewhat restricted, so you need to figure out what you want to see and when the college will be open. I missed getting into Kings College on my first try, but eventually got in to see the Christopher Wren Chapel and the grounds:
Paul and I stayed at Fitzwilliam College where my conference was being held. We went to a lovely "drinks reception" in the college garden and drank Pimm's and felt very British. We ate tapas at La Tasca and pasta at Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurant. I went for a nice three mile run around town to help keep my commitment to a healthy lifestyle.
In the United States, the oldest and most traditional long distance bus service is run by a company called "Greyhound." Taking a long bus trip is colloquially known as "riding the dog." As children, my parents drug us kicking and screaming gave us the opportunity to visit Houston, Texas each summer. Most of the time, we flew on an airplane, but one year my parents decided to put the four oldest children on the bus to Texas. I guess they felt that we were old enough to handle the trip on our own and that it was just getting too damn expensive to fly eight people roundtrip from Los Angeles to Houston. They flew with my two youngest siblings, while my older sister, two brothers (one older, one younger) and I rode the dog.
I remember the trip well. It's a long way from southern California to west Texas. . . approximately 1400 miles! I remember breathing a sigh of relief 15 hours into the trip when we finally crossed the border into Texas. My excitement was quickly dashed when I realized that, given the size of Texas, we were still only half way to our destination! My parents had told us to only get off the bus when we needed to go to the bathroom, and generally speaking, we followed their directive. We did disembark for one unscheduled stop when the bus driver instructed everyone to get off the bus at a diner which served his favorite pie, but we were extra careful not to get left behind. Other than that, we sat, slept and ate on the bus. After a day and a half, we rolled into Houston, feeling tired and grimy.
Now, my oldest brother was the apple of my parents' eye. As the first born boy, my mother spoiled him terribly. He also had mild asthma, which was a bit of a concern to her. Well, not liking having to spend all that time on the bus, he disembarked and immediately let out some weak sounding coughs. He complained loudly about how the air conditioning on the bus had aggravated his asthma. Sounding like Mimi at the end of La Boheme, he eventually convinced my parents that he couldn't possibly make the long bus journey home. It was decided that he and my father would switch places. My brother would fly home in style, and my dad would ride the dog with the three hearty kids.
Although we had made the trip to Texas a nonstop affair, after a day on the bus, my father decided we should disembark in El Paso and spend the night in a hotel. My father was a prolific story teller, and he regaled us with stories of the hotel we stayed in, the restaurant in which we ate and his various exploits in El Paso. He also decided that we should walk across the border into Juarez, Mexico. He agreed to buy each of us one souvenir of our choosing. I remember looking at all the stalls and feeling a bit of panic. I didn't want to make the wrong decision. I feared settling on one thing, only to find something I liked even better later in the day. My dad got a little impatient with my indecision, and I remember getting a little teary when he said that if I didn't decide soon, I would leave empty handed. Finally, I found it . . . the perfect souvenir. A wooden treasure chest, in which I could keep all the treasures of my youth. I took it home and, through the years, it housed all kinds of secret and sentimental curios.
We still occasionally tease my brother about how he weaseled out of the bus trip home. . . we look at him, give a weak cough and say "oh, my asthma is acting up." I still have the treasure chest my father bought me in Juarez. That's it, in the photograph at the top of today's post. There's nothing inside it right now; yet it contains the most important thing of all. It's full of the memories of that trip . . . of the dark nights in the bus, watching the mile posts go by; of the taste of that wonderful apple pie from the diner off the interstate; of my father's voice telling stories; and the vision of him walking the streets of El Paso and Juarez. The chest is empty of physical items, but it contains an even bigger treasure - the memories 0f riding the dog with my father.
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I hope you enjoyed this travel story, brought to you as part of Sian's Storytelling Sunday. For other stories, check out this link. Speaking of travel, I'm on vacation again. This week, the family is visiting Seattle, Washington and kayaking in the San Juan Islands. I've left some auto-posts for my blog but I may have trouble visiting your blogs and commenting until I return.
I created one more art journal page, in the style of Joan Miro. It contains a prayer to St. Francis (patron saint of animals) asking to help my dog Gypsy get better. Our little girl is holding steady so far, but she's not regenerating red blood cells the way she should. We keep hoping that the drugs will kick in and we won't end up right back where we started before the emergency transfusion last weekend. Thanks so much for all your good wishes. She really is the sweetest thing and has worked her way into our hearts in a very short time. Sigh.
These art journal pages are very different for me because they contain only hand drawn images. They're pretty primitive representations, but that's Miro's style and something I can manage (not being very talented in the drawing department). I generally tend to rely on collage images for my art journal pages. So, what do you think of these? Do you prefer drawings in art journal pages or other types of images?
I'm working on Dina Wakley's "Work Outside Your Journal" challenge, designed to get art journalers to work on canvas or other backgrounds outside their journals. The goal is to do two a week during the month of August. Here's my second canvas for the first week of August. It's a 12x12 canvas, on which I have created a patchwork of painted plaster pieces and added an image. I'm not really sure where to go next, and I'd love ideas. I have made one other similar piece, which you can see here. Thanks in advance for your ideas.
Dina Wakley is challenging art journalers to move outside their journals this month and work on a canvas or other background. She suggests doing two per week! So, here's my first project. It's a plaster nicho, painted with acrylics and featuring bunting from some Cosmo Cricket paper and painted chipboard from Maya Road. There's a little journaling on the bunting which reads"Childhood is the most beautiful of all of life's seasons." It also fits perfectly into Gingersnap Creations subject for this month, "Babes and Tots." It feels great to be finishing some projects. Got any great quotes about childhood to share?
Yesterday I blogged about how my online classes have affected my vacation photography. Today, I'm posting a couple of pages from my art journals that were affected by my vacation. In London, we saw a Joan Miro exhibit at the Tate Modern Museum, and I found it incredibly inspiring. His work is bold and political; so many of his canvases look like art journal pages. Plus, his overall style is easily adapted as elements in art journal pages. In the gift shop, I bought a book featuring many of the canvases in the exhibit and a very cool book (meant for children) called "Draw with . . . Joan Miro" by Ana Salvador. I snapped it up and used it to do some sketches and complete a few art journal pages. The one up top has a great quote from Miro which reads "A work is finished when there is nothing left that annoys me." It's a simple page, but I like it.
I also made this page in my Smash Journal/Sketchbook featuring some Miro creatures.
Any Miro fans out there?
While editing my vacation photographs, I realized that many of my photographs had been influenced by classes I have taken. The photograph above, in the chapel at Sudely Castle in Winchcomb includes some modern art that hangs over the altar in front of the stained glass window. I loved the juxtaposition of the two images, and I think I learned to see this from a Shimelle class (maybe love your pictures, love your pages). This picture was definitely affected by the Beautiful People portrait class I just completed:
As was this portrait, which I was considering using for the scavenger hunt "protest or political action" entry. I had to be brave and ask this young lady if I could take her picture. I wish I would have been even braver and asked her to move around a bit to make better use of the available light and to declutter the background. She was in Cambridge, England, raising money for a school in Africa:
For these two pictures, I used some technical skills I learned in a Shimelle class and in Get Out of Auto to get the sky right, as well as composition skills to create different moods:
Finally, I took these two photographs thinking they were perfect candidates for some PSE Textures:
Have you noticed that on-line classes affect the photographs you take on vacation (or in general)?
![LEAP [into lightroom]](http://learn.kimklassen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Kim-Klassen_20151223_6459.jpg)
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