All this open space!

So much room to breathe

& to run.

I can run miles out here, not see a soul. No traffic, no noise, no scary people.

Just me & the red dirt & this big sky.

-iPhone Post

As promised, some photos of our new neighbourhood.

Hover over each pic for words

So my blog is kinda the reverse of most. The holiday-season has come & gone & you didn’t hear a word from me. This is usually the busiest, bloggiest time of the year for most sites. You’d expect me to do a big x-mas themed post with kitchen adventures & stories, ..well x-mas was total bore-mas. We were in a motel that week, no special dinner, no decorations, no special anything.

Then came new years, right on time. I swear I must be the only blogger out there who didn’t post their new years resolutions. Well, we spent the new years countdown trucking across the state-line from Arizona to California, carting belongings from storage to our new house. No partying for us obviously.

So the holiday season was all a bit of a non-event for me, despite being really excited for it originally. I suppose that’s life, the lead-up & anticipation to stuff is often more exciting than the actual event. Meh, I’ll make up for it next year. I am (shamefully) a fan of x-mas & making a big deal of the holiday but living out of a backpack & on a tight budget just didn’t allow for the occasion this time around.

This week we’ve just been decompressing in our new house in Apple Valley & airing out the backpacks. It’s a small town north of LA, in the California desert, & I’m surprising myself just how much I’m able to appreciate the landscape (ask me again come summer however). Nik & I have made a ritual of going for a drive each afternoon to explore a new area of the valley, climb some rocks, take some photos, explore abandoned buildings, watch the desert sunset etc. There is surprisingly a lot to see & do in this barren land. We’re right next to the ol’ Route 66 so there is a lot of Americana scenery, historic old buildings & stuff to check out, lots of big factories & cool industrial areas to explore (& proving to be great photography subjects), plus all the desert landscapes that still intrigue me. I love all the open space. It’s just what I was craving, coming from our claustrophobic Vegas apartment.

I’ve been a bit of a shutterbug, taking hundreds & hundreds of photos this week. Nik taught me a few software techniques that I’m just loving. I was never able to do HDR with my basic point n’ shoot camera since it can’t do multiple exposures etc, so Nik found a way around that problem by creating multiple exposures with different values in photoshop, & doing it all post-camera from just one photo (seems so simple but it never dawned on us). Very cool. I’ll post some pics eventually, but I’m still having fun taking my time & experimenting. ..We also don’t have a decent internet connection at the house yet, so uploading pics may have to wait.

Until next time.

We moved into a new house at 2am last night in Apple Valley, California. Woke up this morning excited to explore my new neighbourhood.