So if you’ve hung around me much at all and discussed travel, you’ve no doubt heard me talk about the Megabus.  One of my friends has heard me say it so many times he now yells “MEGA!” every time I mention it.  At any rate, I’m always willing to share my stories about it because people are always curious when you tell them you took a bus somewhere a good distance away.  There is no doubt a stigma about bus travel.

    Holly and I started researching Iceland some time back and quickly found that people were saying it was expensive.  Just how expensive was a little hard to gauge… but expensive none-the-less.  We wanted to do this trip more or less free style; with only plane tickets, a rental car, and the first night’s hotel booked, so cutting costs as much as possible up front while those costs were known was important to us… enter Megabus.  Holly and I had a good experience with Megabus the first time around (you can read about it here) so we thought we’d give it another look.  Tickets were a whopping $22 this time… that’s total for both of us, round trip.  After comparing flights, taking the Megabus to Washington D.C. and then flying to Iceland from there as opposed to flying to D.C. from Knoxville and then on to Iceland was going to save us a little over $600.  $11 a person versus $300 per person is a pretty substantial difference.  So we could a) leave on a plane Sunday morning and arrive in DC just in time to wait around the airport for 10 hours for the flight to Iceland or b) leave on a bus Saturday night and arrive in DC with plenty of time to goof off and make it to the airport for the very same flight to Iceland and SAVE $600.  Pretty straight forward.

    I’ll be honest and tell you that the ride there was pretty darn miserable.  It was outrageously hot on the bus for the first half of the trip.  I was luckily wearing my trusty zip-off pants and had layered, so I stripped down to shorts and a t-shirt… it was just hard to get away from the heat.  I think I dosed a little, but I couldn’t get to sleep.  The drivers recognized the problem and left the doors open at the rest stop to try and dump the heat… literally everyone got off the bus to stand in the cold to cool off.  15 minutes with the doors open did the trick and the rest of the ride there just fine.  We all put our clothes back on and were comfortable.

   After arriving in D.C., Holly and I walked over to the nearest Metro station (Union) and took it to the Rosslyn station where we caught the Metro bus to the airport.  We mistakenly thought we’d have plenty of time to get to the airport and drop our stuff off at the hotel (more on that in a minute) and then go back to D.C. for some sight seeing… that didn’t work out so well though.  We bought the all day Metro passes and then 2 and a half hours later finally made it to the airport… we had no idea.  We missed the first Metro bus by apparently minutes and then had to stand there for another hour waiting on the next one.  The bus ride itself took over 45 minutes with very little traffic.  Don’t try to pull this off with tight timelines is the take away here.  We decided not to risk being late for our flight by going back in to town and gave our all day passes to some other travelers leaving the airport.

    The way home was less eventful.  The Metro bus was waiting at the airport when we arrived and we traversed the subway system with ease.  We hung out at Union Station until it was close to time for the Megabus to depart and then made the short walk over and boarded almost immediately.  Timing is everything.  The ride home was comfortable and I slept almost the entire trip. 

    I’ll again be honest and say I was a bit grumpy from all the traveling.  When we made it to Union station and then had a couple hours to burn before the bus was to leave… I was none too excited to be hanging out.  There is a convenience factor to flying that can sometimes be hard to put a value on.  We realistically got to Iceland the same time we would have had we flown and we got home the morning after we would have arrived home had we flown (assuming we didn’t miss any connections… which seems to happen every time we fly).  We could have slept in our own bed as opposed to sleeping on a bus.  At the time, I would have paid the $600 to just be home.  600 bucks is 600 bucks… I’d do it again.  Now that Megabus is going to Atlanta, you can bet I’ll be looking into flying out of Hartsfield-Jackson instead of Dulles… even though I HATE Hartsfield with a passion.  Is it worth it to save a bunch of extra money?  I happen to think so.

The Day Room

    As a funny aside; when looking at the layover in D.C., Holly and I jokingly talked about trying to find a hotel that rented rooms by the hour so we could crash for a bit.  After doing some digging, we found that a lot of hotels actually offer what is called a “day room”.  Check-in times are generally early in the morning and I believe our check-out time was at 8 or 9PM… past when we needed to be gone anyway.  We compared the prices ($70) to the various airline clubs in the airport ($40 per person with our credit card benefit… although that doesn’t seem like much of a benefit) and decided it was a no-brainer to have a private room / bathroom and a bed we could take a nap in as opposed to just lounge chairs and finger food.  We got the room and were able to hang around and have a restful afternoon and then took the free shuttle to the airport and arrived in Iceland very rested and ready to tackle a new country.  Good times!

–Dan Thompson

    Everyone has “that place”.  You know, that place you’ve always wanted to go to, or maybe you’ve been and you’d love to go back.  Given the opportunity, you’ll kick your heals up and take a quick trip there in your mind.  THAT place.

    Easter Island is that place for me.  Why Easter Island?  I really couldn’t tell you exactly.  Maybe I saw those Time-Life “Mysteries of the Unknown” book series commercials a few too many times as a kid, or maybe I was a little too fascinated with aliens and extraterrestrial possibilities; or it could have been all of the above.  In any case, the Moai of Easter Island captured my imagination the first time I laid eyes on them.  Being able to walk up to one and touch it was literally a dream come true. 

    For the next couple weeks I’ll share some pictures from my favorite place on earth.  Where is yours… and more importantly… when are you going?

–Dan Thompson

Anti-Christian Icelandic heathen bastards… why in the world was I searching for that on Google? …I’ll get to that in a second.

    While I was researching things I wanted to see in Iceland I happened to stumbled upon this amazing time lapse video created in Iceland.  One of the scenes in the film depicts the airplane above… and that was enough.  I had to see it and take pictures of it myself.  Now, I know when you see this picture you immediately think Iceland… I just can’t help it though. I see things like this and I just have to see them for myself.  Anyway, after quite a bit of research I found that the plane wreckage was in the Sólheimasandur area of Southern Iceland and found some rough instructions on getting to it.  After Holly and I visited the Solheimajokull Glacier (don’t worry, I can’t pronounce it either), the weather had mostly cleared up so we decided to give our navigation skills a test and we set out across the “black sand desert” in search for our DC3 carcass.

    Now, the intriguing thing to me about this plane was partly the wreckage itself, and partly the surroundings it sits in.  Lots of the pictures I found of the plane appear to be almost black and white images because the area is so devoid of color.  The ground is totally black and on an overcast day, the sky is basically white / grey.  Definitely other-worldly.  This DC3 sits about 2 miles off the main highway and all this coarse black sand slopes gently down to the ocean… to the point when you’re out there, all you can see is black, ocean, and mountains WAY off in the distance.  A little freaky.  So Holly and I park the car a little ways off from the plane and proceed to walk to it.  On the way out there we can see that there are other people already there.  I immediately think “great… these people are going to be in my way”.  As we get closer we notice that there is a girl there wearing a long white dress, which has now turned black at the bottom… and there is another person there that appears to be wearing a long red robe of some sort.  Okay… well that’s a little strange.  The closer we get, the weirder it gets.  This dude that’s in the red robe is also not wearing a shirt… and it’s freezing outside… and he’s got what appears to be blood all over him AND his face is painted red with a white stripe across his eyes.  To make matters even more interesting, there was what looked to be a coffin laying in the sand not too far away.  Holly is obviously thinking they’re going to kills us and drink our blood by now and is suggesting… quite insistently… that maybe we should just leave.  I, on the other hand, am a little less moved by the situation and bound and determined to get my shots, and… I recognized these people.

    The previous night Holly and I had walked into a local dive in Vik that was a gas station with a little diner in the back.  If you’ve seen our pictures on Flickr or Facebook, the picture of me eating a hamburger with a fried egg on top; well, that was this place.  As soon as we walked in I had noticed a table full of people.  They all had a punk rocker look about them and were apparently having a good time.  One of them was obviously American and the rest, I guessed, were Icelandic.  When they got up to leave I looked and the back of one of their shirts said “Anti-Christian Icelandic Heathen Bastards”.  Nice.  As a Believer my mind began to wonder what kind of place I had stumbled in to.  As fate would have it, our paths would cross again… these people with fake blood all over themselves… were the same group we had seen at the diner. 

   They didn’t kill us… in fact they were quite nice.  I didn’t ask what they were doing, but it was obvious they were shooting a video or movie of some sort.  I could see that some of the shots they were doing were going to turn out pretty cool, so I’ve been curious ever since then to find out what they were making.  Well… it got the best of me yesterday and I started Googling.  A MySpace page led to a Facebook page… which led to a music video… of a girl dragging a coffin and this very plane in one of the scenes.  Crazy the world we live in isn’t it?  Sólstafir is the name of the band, and while I wouldn’t really recommend them, I must say this video turned out pretty cool. The song isn’t bad either… but that may be because I can’t understand what they’re saying.   The really cool thing is we visited all the places in the video, and when the crazy painted up dude with the long fingernails and stringy hair smiles in the video… I was standing right behind the guy holding the camera… clicking away as I do when surrounded by such beauty; and sometimes weirdness.

–Dan Thompson

Sometimes you just need a change of perspective.

    Last spring when I started working on star trails photos in Cades Cove, the first cabin I shot was the John Oliver cabin.  It’s the closest cabin to the entrance, and being in Cades Cove at night was something new (and a little scary / creepy)… so that was a plus.  The first time I went I convinced myself that the picture would be best from the other side of the cabin, and I spent four or five different nights trying to make it work.  For multiple reasons it was hard to get a composition that got enough sky in it to be interesting for star trails and I was forced to do portrait orientation; something I’m not generally a fan of for scenic shots like this.  With the camera more or less on the ground, I tried it over and over… and finally gave up.  I moved on to the little Methodist Church and instantly got results I was pleased with, and so it was, I just rode by John Oliver’s place every other night on the way to somewhere else… thinking to myself, surely there is a shot there.

    Well, a couple months ago I convinced my nephew Andrew to tag along, and not wanting to kill him on our first night out I decided to just stop at the Oliver cabin.  I sat the shot up much the same way I had on many other nights and let the camera go to work.  I had just attended my first Night Photography class at the University of Tennessee and the instructor mentioned that one night we would try out making ghosts in our pictures.  Basically what you do is setup a long exposure shot, and have someone stand in the shot for only part of the exposure… the end result is that you can see the person… but you can see THROUGH them as well.  Kind of neat.  I wanted to make the night entertaining for my nephew (Holly had long sense gotten bored of coming with me, and she wouldn’t let me go alone… so I needed an accomplice), so when I had gotten enough pictures to do the star trails I started taking pictures of us in the shot as ghosts (you can see one of them here).  We kept coming up with different things to try and it occurred to me that it might be super creepy to do a ghost type shot of someone standing in the window of the cabin.  We moved around to the other side of the cabin and I did a couple test shots… that’s when it hit me.  I had been shooting the cabin from the wrong side the entire time!  It was too late to start another stair trail shot that night… but I had the composition figured out.  Three weeks ago the conditions finally worked out and so I returned and captured this image.  THIS was what I had been after.

–Dan Thompson

    The cantilever barn at the Tipton place is, in my opinion, the most iconic structure in Cades Cove.  When I started shooting the buildings in Cades Cove at night, I quickly decided I wanted to do a picture of the barn; but I wanted to wait till after all the leaves were gone because of all the brush around… so this weekend it finally worked out.  The moon was BRIGHT, but the sky was really clear.

    While my nephew and I were hanging out waiting for the image to complete (about an hour), we had a pretty interesting experience.  We were sitting around in our lawn chairs and the coyotes started howling away as they usually do.  Out of nowhere though, one starts howling right on top of us!  In the Cove it is really hard to gauge where and how many coyotes there are, but when you can hear one breath in-between howls, you know it is CLOSE.  My nephew and I both stood up, startled, and the coyote proceeded to start barking at us.  You know that bark, when you’re walking next to a fence and the dog on the other side is none-to-happy for you to be there… yeah, that was it.  We never actually saw it, but it definitely knew we were there.  It went on for about five minutes or so and then gave up and went on its way.  A little hair-raising at first… but pretty neat as well.

–Dan Thompson

    So this morning I spent a little time thinking about 2012 and what all I wanted to accomplish and I also took some time to think back over 2011.  This week instead of doing a new picture for POTW I decided to do a collage of some of the things that happened over the last 12 months… a sort of year end review.

    Holly and I got to go to some cool places in 2011.  Earlier in the year we went out to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.  We were excited and amazed by what we found there and really underscored for us just how truly blessed our Nation is with beautiful parks that we can all enjoy.  Holly and I also discovered the Megabus this past year which led to two trips to Washington D.C.; one of which was just a weekend getaway to check out the museums and one was a way to cut down on trip costs… that trip of course was to Iceland.   Iceland was a truly unique place and I can honestly say that, had you asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought I’d go to Iceland, I would likely have told you no.  Our horizons and dreams are constantly changing, who knows where 2012 will have us.

    Photography was something I spent a lot more time doing this past year.  Between taking classes and just general goofing around, I spent a lot of time behind my camera.  I also fell in love with night photography and have become somewhat of an addict.  I’ve spent the weekend checking out weather reports and trying to decide if I’ll get to go out night shooting at all.  That’s just kind of how it goes here lately.

    2011 also had its emotional highs and lows.  Holly and I said goodbye to a very dear friend this past year, Dale Young. Dale was a great man and a true friend; the kind you don’t find too often.  I’m positive we will continue to miss him in 2012, but are blessed to have such great memories.  One thing we will NOT miss, however, is cancer.  On the other end of the emotional spectrum Holly finished up all her treatments and we celebrated multiple times her victory over breast cancer.  I think we both came away with a more tuned appreciation for life and all that God has given us.  Here’s to never forgetting that.

Happy New Year friends.

–Dan Thompson

    Yes… we’re that couple. LOL You know… the ones that take pictures of themselves with their cat in front of the Christmas tree.   I think we did it the first year sort of poking fun at other people that did it, and the pictures were so funny because the cat never cooperates that we made it a tradition.  Oscar starting kicking and biting at Holly about 2 seconds after this shot; you can tell he’s none-to-excited to be participating.  I do, however, think this is the first year we’ve ever published such a photo.

    Here’s hoping for another cancer free and fun filled year; from our family (cat included) to yours, Merry Christmas.

–Dan Thompson

    I think every guy, at some point in their life, is infatuated with airplanes.  Whether it is dreaming of being a fighter pilot after seeing the movie Top Gun, building model airplanes, or checking out every book the local library has on them… it seems we all go through it.  Most of us don’t go on to become ‘Maverick’, but I’d imagine that we all still get a little excited at the thought of sitting in the pilot’s seat or getting full access to a plane on the ground… at least I do anyway; so I was totally thrilled to find out that the last field trip of the University of Tennessee’s ‘Night Photography’ class would be held at Island Home Airport.  Turns out that instructor Steve Chastain is good friends with a couple of the good people over at Remote Area Medical, and they got us access to the hangar where their planes are kept.  Yep, totally cool.  This was BY FAR the most fun I’ve had in any photography class (no offense to my previous instructors… but this was super cool)… there was just so much to shoot.  The moon was full and the planes were shiny.  It was awesome.

–Dan Thompson

    Last week I started a series of photos I took while attending Steve Chastain’s, Night Photography class, at the University of Tennessee.  This week’s picture is a little out of the ordinary for me as I’m not generally in to taking pictures of people (especially people I don’t know).  Despite my former instructors’ best efforts, posing people is still kind of awkward and having an idea in your head for what you want the picture to look like is hard for me… with nature photography (or cars or whatever), the objects are immovable and what you see is what you get.  The picture is good, or it isn’t, based on where you put yourself and most importantly what kind of lighting you have.  Anyway, this week’s photo is one that I was happy with from all those exercises.  I really liked the high contrast of the image… the heavy shadows and overpowering highlights.  He’s thinking about something… its up to us to imagine what that is.

–Dan Thompson

    A couple weeks ago I wrapped up a night photography class that I had been taking at the University of Tennessee led by Steve Chastain, and so I thought I’d take a couple weeks and share some of the images I took.  This class was a little different from the previous ones I’d taken at UT in that the assumption was that you understood how to use your camera… so we just went out and shot… which was awesome.  The second week of class we met down to Volunteer Landing in Downtown Knoxville and did some shooting along the boardwalk there.  The time hadn’t changed yet so it was a great time to catch some late evening light.  Henley Street bridge has been under construction (destruction?) for quite some time now and made for some interesting photos.  It almost looks like something out of a war zone with just the towers and arches remaining.

    As many of you know, night photography has become something of a passion of mine (some have called it an obsession), so this class was right up my alley.  If you’re into photography, I’d recommend this class as it covers a lot of the challenges that shooting in low light situations present… AND, you get to go to some interesting places to learn.  Fun stuff!

–Dan Thompson