In which our intrepid hero provides veritas and vino, entirely coincidentally…

Farms interest me.  I am a city boy, through and through; I have spent virtually all of my life living in one of three cities:  El Paso, San Antonio, and Columbus.  But I do have a small amount of familiarity with farms, because relatives of mine owned a cotton farm near the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico and we visited often.  In fact, for a considerable number of years I was there pretty much every weekend, because my father bought a horse (for deer hunting purposes) and reached an agreement with my great-uncle to build a corral on his farm to house the horse and the horse of a family friend.  My dad went out each weekend to ride and brought me along to clean up the corral for him.  So I can say, if nothing else, that I shoveled tons and tons of manure on a cotton farm in my childhood.

[Remember you can click on the photographs here to see larger, better versions]

Here’s a dilapidated but still inhabited farmhouse.  Note that it has a small version of the structure I described in the previous blog post:  an upright rectangular structure, with a lower structure stretching out to the back.  In this example, the extension is considerably smaller than the previous example.

I see a ton of cemeteries as I drive through Ohio, but not that many that interest me.  Tiny little roadside cemeteries like the below example, or even smaller, are quite common.  Some of the headstones in this cemetery interested me because of their odd discoloration, which made me think for a time that they had been constructed of metal (which would be very odd).

Ohio is one of a number of states that dabbles to some degree in viniculture.  I have no idea if any Ohio wines are any good—in my entire life I may not have had a dozen glasses of wine and I know nothing about it.   This particular vineyard was interesting because so many of its vines were deliberately aligned in a narrow strip next to the road.

These vines are from the Terra Cotta Vineyards, near New Concord.

I am presuming this is a donkey and not a miniature horse.  In any case, he was a curious little fellow.

I debated long and hard whether or not to include this picture.  I came across this covered bridge with a Mail Pouch tobacco sign, but the traffic was really bad and there was no place on the other side of the road from which I could take a picture.  So I could only take a crappy picture that would not stand as a photograph, but only as a record of the bridge’s existence.  In the end, I took the picture and in the end, I included it here, even though it has no merits as a photograph.  I still am not sure if I should have included it.

These last “dilapidated building” pictures are from a small town I passed through.  I don’t know if it was New Concord or not.  Unfortunately, this was before I began taking pictures of my GPS system to document the towns I was in.

This last picture, obviously the same structure as in the above shot, uses the Sony RX100’s watercolor filter, which is one of the best such painting filters I’ve seen.  I quite like what it does to this scene.