Erich's Photo and Travel

Another trip out to Barr Lake with only our Cameras and super telephoto lenses in tow.  
We opted to bring monopods in lieu of our heavier Manfrotto Tripods as our last trip we were overloaded with cameras and lenses.
I think our trial and error is paying off.

What's one to do when you buy a new lens (discounted $300 by the way)?  Thats right, go shoot some birds at one of the many Colorado State Parks.
Lucky for us, Barr Lake is just a few minute drive for us.
We got up at 5am thinking that we would roll out of bed and hit the road.  Well, that didn't happen.  We got on the road at 6am and arrived a few minutes later.
Our new lenses added an additional 3lbs to our backpacks and along with the tripod and water bottles it was a wonder we could walk at all.

Our goal was to go out to the Gazebo.  Michelle thought it was a short walk (with a 15lb backpack in tow) but it was about 1 1/2 miles.  Normally, this would be about 30 minute walk but a ton of birds everywhere it took us about an hour or so to reach our destination.



How big are our lenses?

I never had a Lego set as a kid.  Closest thing I got to Legos as a kid was stepping on the little fucking pieces at a neighbors house.  Maybe the past experience tainted my need to ever touch them.
So why did I buy some?  Macro Photography.  
We headed out to Target to pick up some household items and visited the toy aisle.  Target had two dedicated aisles to Legos but not a lot to choose from.  Of course, I picked up a Star Wars set.  Luke Skywalker's X-Wing.  The set included mini Luke, R2-D2 and a Stormtrooper.






My Lego photoshoot was going well but then Barbie and her cronies crashed my party and took over the shoot.






The two suns began to set on Tantooine so we got in our ship and headed to Dagoba.

Once again, we needed to get out of work for a few days.  Not because we hate working but we hate working in the house all day.
The vacation days are piling up so we had to burn a few more days.
Off to Gunnison, Montrose and The Black Canyon in Colorado.
Due to the COVID crap, we needed to find a hotel in that had a kitchen.  No luck finding one unless we wanted to stay in Grand Junction, CO.  A bit too far from our planned activities.
Hmm, what about Air BnB?  
We never used AirBnB before so we created an account and dove in.  Within a minute or two we found the perfect place.  A cabin in a rural area of Montrose.
$95 a night and built just for two.
We picked up all of the food that we would need to make breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday and loaded up the Yeti 35 and RTIC65 coolers.  This was a great idea as we only had to buy a couple of things.  The only other expense was gas.  Way to fucking cool.






Since we were going to be here for three nights, we thought that we would try some night …

Memorial Day vacations are for suckers!  Go the following weekend and avoid the crowds (aka cluster fucks).

Due to the current COVID crap that is going on we both reached our vacation day caps so our employers told us to take a couple of days off.

Since we finally got some good weather (aka spring) we felt a road trip was in order.

Unfortunately four days isn't enough to head down to Telluride or Durango so we opted to head over to Utah and visit Dinosaur National Monument.

Now, in all fairness, we knew that the visitor center and quarry at the monument were closed and that we were taking non essential travel but being cooped up in the house with nothing to do was just not going to happen.  Period.

We got our camera bags packed, truck loaded and booked a hotel in Vernal, UT.  Vernal is the closest town to the monument.

Not a lot of good hotels in town.  Most of them dumps and with all of the COVID stuff going a we didn't know what our food options would be so a kitchenette wa…