As with the trip home from Myrtle Beach, there were so many excellent pictures from the drive down to Nashville that it simply was impossible for me to not post them.  Unlike the trip from Myrtle, I don’t think I’ll be spending as much time breaking down my thoughts on why I did or did not include certain pictures…..  But you never know.

Yes, I’m starting off with one of the pictures from the blog.  This actual perspective (which I don’t recall editing very much) is a big part of what prompted me to end up on back roads in Kentucky.  The thought was simple – if the view from the highway is this beautiful, how much more so will it be on back roads?  I wasn’t disappointed:

Just a couple representative pictures of the views to which I was treated on this trip.  The top and bottom picture were edited slightly, but only to get them back to the basic feel of how things actually looked that morning – snapping pictures while driving (aside from being stupid and illegal) is not as easy as it looks.  Also, it’s a frustrating juxtaposition of emotions:  A large part of me wants to simply pass through on the road without taking any pictures so that I can fully immerse myself in the experience of it, but another large part of me wants to capture pictures for posterity and to share with you.  I try to blend the two as much as possible – capture some pictures, but retain a lot of it internally without photographic evidence.

I had to tweak this pano some to make it work… but it still wasn’t good enough to make the blog.  It does, however, do a decent job of really capturing the essence of how fully immersed in naturally beauty that you truly are on a back road adventure.  There are so many features of this picture that I really like:  the pipe resting on the dash, the stately and majestic trees towering above their surroundings in both driver’s & passenger’s side windows, the way the phone actually struggled a good bit with the differing qualities of light and colors as I made my way across the 150 or so degrees of perspective in this picture, the various road signs and telephone poles & wire, even my hand on the wheel.  See, I’m blathering on about these pictures, even though I said I wouldn’t.

More of the many pictures that were considered for and ultimately left out of the actual blog.  The top and second from bottom pictures were two of the more excellent shots from the trip, and were in the final running for what I consider to be the representative picture of this particular blog (chosen picture is below).  I didn’t go with them ultimately because the visible portion of the road in them was too straight, and didn’t present the right representation of twisty winding back roads.

I don’t really like the bottom picture:  aside from it being not altogether very captivating, it really does a great job of highlighting the bug guts on the middle of my windshield… which I really regret not wiping off, as it showed up (and ruined) a lot of great pictures.

I really love the look of the streaky sunbeam pictures, especially because they do a great job capturing the essence of my experience out the driver’s side window.  I call it experience, not view, because it truly was more than just a view…  it really was an experience.  I don’t know how else to describe it.

Representative picture that I chose for the blog is below.  As you might have noticed, it is also the header picture of the TBR Facebook page.  If you have Facebook, make sure to like & follow the page (hell, set it up to show up first in your newsfeed!) to get the latest updates, pictures, blah blah shameless plug.

Here are a few more pictures for you to enjoy.  I hope that you enjoy them.  I also hope that when I come back in to edit this blog in the near future, I will not be too overly annoyed at my mindless after-midnight commentary.

Digital cameras now have a double-exposure function called HDR, which essentially shoots two pictures in rapid succession –  one with highlights in focus, the other with shadows in focus – which are then stitched together to give you one “High Dynamic Range” picture.  Every once in a while you end up with a picture like the above, where it attempted to shoot HDR, but because I was moving and aiming the camera out of the side of the vehicle, you get the double exposure appearance that’s most noticeable as “shadows” of the foliage seen above the house.

One of the most heavily edited pictures of the bunch, I had hoped to squeeze this picture into the blog as the representation of the stately beauty of the race horse ranches in Kentucky.  It didn’t fit the flow of the story, so it’s highlighted here instead.  I like how the vignette feature gives an almost ominous quality to the beauty of the scene:  things aren’t quite as rosy as they appear on the surface.  It makes an understated but still effective statement about wealth without needing to punch you in the face with it.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was that every little store in this town, and especially the Old Sugar Valley Country Store, were all closed when I passed through.  I probably would’ve lost at least half an hour perusing the wares I could see through the windows.  You may have also noticed that the top picture is the featured image from the Convenience Blog.

Just some more back road scenery pictures.  Side note – the pictures above would be good options if I had decided to name the blog “The Road Less Taken,” wouldn’t they?

Some more pictures of the magical Makers Mark Road.

….than meets the eye

 

Lincoln’s birth town of Hodgenville KY.  There’s actually some interesting stuff going on in the bottom picture:  the statue of Lincoln in the center of the square with the Lincoln Museum in the background, the very Americana farmtown church across the way, and of course, my personal favorite – the large John Deere tractor sitting in a parking spot by the church, as if it were normal for a John Deere tractor to be parked in a church parking lot.  It feels like the start to a joke… “You know you’re in Kentucky when …”

Top picture is the farm tractor I got stuck behind – like I said, very reminiscent of my time living in the cornfields of central Ohio.  The middle picture I recall very strongly, because it’s on KY 84 just east of where the road intersects with I65 south of Louisville.  It made such a strong impression on me because I was aware the highway was coming up soon, but to look at the farm country I was still surrounded by, you’d never know it.

The bottom picture is one from the drive home, taken from the highway.  I have no idea why, but solitary trees in a wide open field like that are really captivating to me, and especially with the vignette editing, I think it turns a pretty generic and bland landscape picture into something very powerful and moving.

Ahhhh, Nashville:  a dirty and generally pretty tacky downtown scene absolutely DOMINATED by one massive and extremely tacky skyscraper.  I didn’t like Nashville very much, I absolutely hated the Batman-looking AT&T building, and had a way-too-hard time finding good music in the Music City.  The Johnny Cash Museum, on the other hand….

….. was absolutely amazing.  It was on the smaller side, but we still spent nearly two hours there, and probably could’ve spent at least another hour or more.  Super cool and worth the visit if you’re even remotely interested in the guy and his era of music (it also features displays about other prominent artists from that era).

Way too commercialized/modernized/Disney-ized for my taste, but Jim Beam is still one of my favorite bourbons.  Also, Jim Beam liked my picture.  That’s gonna carry me for a while, I’m not gonna lie.  And I wish I had bought some of the BBQ sauce, because what I had with my lunch was delicious.  And I REALLY wish I had taken more pictures at Makers Mark distillery, so you could compare the two… well, it’s really no comparison.   Just go and see for yourself already.

We’ll finish this one up with a dark and gloomy picture of the Tennessee State Capitol building in Nashville.  Call it my political statement for this year.  I hope you enjoyed the blog, and as always, make sure that you take back roads.