In which our intrepid hero feels a sense of deja moo…

One of the sad things about driving around and taking photographs is that, even if the photographs turn out well, even if one of the photographs actually (purely by luck) turned out to be quite high quality, the person who sees that picture will still not have experienced the scene the way my eyes did.  There are times when I wish I could just invite people into my eyeballs so that they can see a scene in just the way my own eyes perceived it.

[Remember that you can click on each image below to see a larger, better version]

We have finally reached the last part of this quite lengthy excursion.  As we shall see, it was getting into the early evening and not long after these last pictures were taken I packed up the camera and just headed home.

Below we have a nice pastoral scene, with cows grazing on a hillside meadow.  I like this photograph not simply for its rustic peacefulness, but it shows rural southeastern Ohio off very nicely.

Here we see another one of those scary bridges that I talked about in my previous blog entry.  I am not sure how much I would trust this bridge to hold my weight!

This shot is a rather mundane shot, but I took it more for didactic purposes than for anything else.  This is a very representative ridgeline road.  When a ridge is not too narrow or wooded, it often ends up looking like this, with houses or mobile homes hugging the road that goes alongside the ridge, possibly with pastureland below them.  This particular ridge is a relatively broad and shallow one; often they are higher and steeper.  The picture also illustrates another facet of rural life—the tendency that so many families have to simply accumulate car after car, for some reason never getting rid of their older ones.

Sadly, I did not note where this picture was taken, but analysis of the direction signs makes me think that this is the tiny hamlet of Malaga, Ohio, so small that Wikipedia did not even have a population for it.  But it has this nice old building among its sights.

Note the sign in front of the building—there were a fair number of these signs dotting the region, indicating the fracking boom currently going on in Ohio.

This large residence, I believe, may belong to an Amish family.  I have seen Amish families in similar houses, plus the farm implement and the long clothesline also suggest that possibility.  I also did not see any electric wires.

In the very late afternoon, I found this sweet ruined old farmhouse.  

The afternoon sun and the long shadows cast by the house combined to produce this photograph, one of my “favorites.”

This photograph may look a tad familiar to readers of my blog…You can’t really tell in the image that appears in my blog header (a cropped version of this photo), but in the distant background of this photograph is a herd of cows.

This somewhat zoomed-in and slightly differently angled shot reveals them a bit more clearly in the distance.

Driving down the road and approaching the cows, one runs across this ruined building.

And right on the other side of the building, we see the cows from a different angle.  Despite the large cloud shadow, I like this picture quite a bit.  The sunshine illuminating the background is a nice contrast and highlights some of the very distant details.  Then there are all those cows staring right at me—the first time I saw this photograph after I took it I realized that all it was missing was a Gary Larson “Far Side” caption.  Those cows are definitely thinking something!