September 5, 2015
We’ve been home from our epic Route 66 Adventure for three months now and I’ve had some time to think and remember parts of our trip. I thought it would be nice to create a few photo collages to capture some of our many memories. Carla liked them enough to suggest we matte and frame them and put on the wall near the family room and kitchen. Here are the three; they are in bright frames – green, blue, and red respectively.
When we started out I had planned on taking a lot of pictures of neon signs. It wasn’t long before I realized that wouldn’t amount to much given we saw them in the bright summer afternoon sunlight rather than lit up at night. I then thought gas stations and gas pumps would serve as symbols of the road marks travelers would have looked for back in the day.
The middle collage is a sampling of the road side attractions we discovered. I’m particularly pleased (if you don’t mind my bragging for a moment) about that mileage sign. It was originally in front of a wall at Afton Station, Oklahoma (you can see it here). I had to learn some Photoshop skills to carefully cut away the wall leaving just the sign.
The bottom collage is of the Route 66 Giants we saw – though the bottom right had wandered down to Wyoming. The big one in the middle is in Atlanta, Illinois, so I have soft spot in my heart since that is near where my mom was born.
Oh, I can hear you: Howard! I thought you saw some trains on this trip; we want to see pictures of trains! Okay, okay. I took these two photos; one a collage and one a single and framed them together for my office.
It’s been a great summer; I’ve learned some Photoshop skills and used them in my own little way to create some tokens of our trip. Though our trip fades into the past I hope these pictures will freshen our memories from time to time.
I’ll leave you with another version of the middle image in the train collage – a westbound BNSF freight crossing the Colorado River at Needles, California.
