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For the past several years Betsy and I have been celebrating our wedding anniversary at the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. The inn has a wonderful restaurant, and the views from the rooms are absolutely beautiful. And it helps that we’re high enough in the mountains that air conditioning is not needed. I imagine we’ll keep going back for more years to come.
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While visiting my son in Florida this past March, we were sitting in his back yard enjoying the setting sun. After the sun disappeared, I captured this photo of the sky through the trees in the yard.
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I captured this picture of Fontana Lake several years ago while Betsy and I were driving through the North Carolina side of the Smokey Mountains. This part of the Smokies is often referred to as the quiet side of the Smokies. That may be true, but it is as beautiful as any other section of the park.
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Back in 2011 Betsy and I took our first trip out west. Among the places we visited was the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. I was impressed at the time with the examples of petrified wood that we saw, but recently, when reviewing some photos taken at the time, I became even more impressed with the detail and color of the petrified wood.
These first two pictures were taken in the Jasper Forest of the park. In that section of the park erosion of high bluffs caused petrified logs to bear strewn across the valley floor.
These next two pictures show petrified wood from the Crystal Forest section of the park. Here the petrified logs are very colorful due to glassy amethyst and quartz crystals that were embedded in the logs.
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It’s been several years since Betsy and I visited Petrified Forest National Park, but I have been recently going through some of the pictures I took during that visit. The petrified wood in the Jasper Forest section of the park was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t get over the detail of the wood that was captured in the stone. It was beautiful, especially when the afternoon sun hit the landscape at a perfect angle.
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My Beautiful Bride really likes tulips, so we make an effort to get to Biltmore to see the tulips in the Walled Garden. Some years we misjudge the weather and the blooms and don’t see much. Other years the blossoms are gorgeous. The picture above was taken during one of those years. We hope we’re as fortunate this year.
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Betsy and I made our first trip out west in 2011. Among the national parks we visited was Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. We found the badlands in the Blue Mesa portion of the park to be both forbidding and beautiful.
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My Beautiful Bride and I have been going to Mt. Nebo State Park in Arkansas for almost 20 years. We’ve missed going a time or two, but we try to get there in February so that we can enjoy the sunsets from ‘our’ cabin on top of the mountain. This picture was taken in 2016, but it does a good job of showing why we keep going back. It’s our little piece of heaven on earth.
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I never get tired of the view we have from Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I never get tired of trying to get a panorama which at least approximates the beauty we enjoy. I got the photos that made up this panorama on a morning in June, 2023. Many of the mountain tops were lost in a sea of fog.
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Betsy and I took our first trip out west in 2011. It was a new experience for both of us, and the landscape was completely different from the forested mountains we enjoy here in Tennessee.
We visited several national parks on that trip, including Petrified Forest/Painted Desert National Park in Arizona. The colors in the rock formations were almost incredible, especially in the Teepees area of the park. There layers of blue, purples and grays were created by iron, carbon, manganese and other minerals in the rock formations.
When viewed under a clear blue sky, the scene was one of incredible beauty.
