50 Year Adventure

When returning to Churchville, Virginia for my 20th high school reunion, I took this photo of the house where I grew up. It is not a great photo as I was in a hurry. The fall leaves were turning, so it was a pretty time of year to be in the Shenandoah Valley.

This is the home where my mother was born and when I was growing up next door I considered them my adopted grandparents. This house seemed much larger when I was a child and on a recent visit it looked even smaller.

This was taken by my mother from my step-father's house backyard. Yet another case of the beauty of Virginia in the fall.

This is one of the earliest photos of me in Churchville, Virginia. I picked up farming at a very young age, which paid off for many years to come. This was taken in the chicken yard behind my adopted grandparents home.

This was taken in front of the gold fish pond that was between our house and my adopted grandparents house. Behind the pond was our shared garden. The tree all the way at the back of the photo was on Whiskey Creek at the back of our small farm.

This is one of many lambs I raised when growing up. The white one is my lamb while my sister's black lamb is hiding behind mine. My sister is holding a 7up bottle with a black rubber nipple, which we used to feed the lambs until they got old enough to live off grass in our pasture. The hill behind us was our next door neighbor's large dairy farm which ended at the tree line at the bottom which was next to Whiskey Creek.

In January of 1987, my wife and I took our four month old son to India. We stayed with friends who lived along Marine Drive in Bombay after arriving in India. This photo was taken early in the morning from their apartment. I like this photo as it shows the taxis and buses that I associate with India.

I really like the colors in these typical Bombay apartment buildings. This photo was taken on my first return trip to India in 1987.

When I first went to India, I was very close to where this photo was taken. On my first return to India I insisted my wife see this same spot. It was a market on Grant Road where I bought my first lungi. This area is what I think of when I think of big cities in India. I like how they stacked extra bundles on top of the roof when they didn't have enough room in their shops.

As we were traveling by train in rural Uttar Pradesh, India I had to take this photo of cycle rickshaw pullers waiting for the train to pass as it reminded me of the rural India I loved the first time I lived in India.

When visitiing the West Bengal Botanical Gardens we had to go all the way into the back to see the world's widest tree. We read that the circumference of this ancient bunyan tree was over one mile long. The whole back part of this photo is a single tree. You can see the people in the distance who are near the tree to give you an idea how large this tree really is.

This is what the same Banyan tree looked like up close. The original tree trunk long ago disappeared but the remaining tree branches are each like a bunch of connected trees. A photo does not do this great tree justice.

This is the Boudhanath Tibetan temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. Walking up the hundreds of steps to the top of the hill to see this temple we saw many curious monkeys along the way. It was worth every step to see this great temple. You can see the Tibetan pray wheels all along the bottom of the temple behind the two men in the photo.

At the foot of the Boudhanath Tibetan temple in Kathmandu, Nepal was this series of Shiva shrines. At the bottom of these temples were the burning ghats.

Burning ghats near Boudhanath Tibetan temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. We actually walk up to this cremation and asked permission to take a photo. This was taken from the bottom most Shiva shrine on the opposite side of the ghats.

We flew into Kathmandu, Nepal from Ranchi, Bihar, India but on the next morning we left Kathmandu Valley by public bus. This was the sight we saw in the early morning fog as we left Kathmandu.

This is the best place in the world for me. This was taken from our hotel room in Pokhara, Nepal in 1987. This is the Himalayan Annapura range with the most holy Himalaya mountain on the left called Fishtail by the foreigners or Machupachara by the Nepalis. Notice the lovely Bougainvillea growing on the hotel wall. A photo cannot really convey the magnificence of the Himalayas as they must be experienced in person.

This is the west end of the Pokhara Valley. The large buildings in the bottom of the valley help show the size of the Himalayas. The Himalaya foothills are around 5000 ft high and the hill behind the buildings is the final foothill.

This is the middle of the Pokhara Valley which shows the great holy mountained namd Machupachara or Fishtail as the foreignors call it. This river in the front of the photo is run off from the Himalayas.

This is a close up photo of the Annapuna I range in the early morning. The great thing about the Himalayas is that they constantly change color are the sun rises and sets.

This is a close up of Machupachara or Fishtail as the foreigners call it in the early morning. It is my favorite Himalaya peak and one of my favorite photos.

This photo was taken as we left Nepal by bus. It is the end of the foothills. The rice terraces are visible on the whole hill in the middle of the small farm house. You can see the flat Indian plain in the distance.

This was the view we saw as we entered the Taj Mahal complex at day break. Besides there being no crowd that time of day, we also got to see the Taj Mahal change colors before us as the sun rose. There is only a single person in the photo, which you can see right in front of the Taj Mahal.

When on the platform in the middle of the reflecting pool at the Taj Mahal complex and turning left this is the view that you see. If you turn right, then the view is nearly exactly the same. I really like thisMogul architecture just as much as the Taj Mahal itself.

This is the back side of the previous photo, which shows just how beautiful the buildings on each side of the Taj Mahal really are. The more I look at these photos, the more I like this ancient architecture.

Eventhough this photo is a bit fuzzy, it gives you the idea of the Taj Mahal and the building on the left side in the same photo. All around the grassy grounds are scenic places for just such photos. There were hundreds of green and yellow parakeets all over the grass when we were there.

This photo shows how the Taj Mahal changes color as the sun rises. This photo was from the left hand side of the Taj Mahal looking right, where you can see the other identical building to the east of the Taj Mahal.

As the sun was fully over the horizon, the Taj Mahal turned a beautiful ornage pink glow. This is from the back side of the Taj Mahal with the red sandstone entrance gate just visible on the right hand side.

This is a close up of the back of the Taj Mahal, where you can see some of the inlaid precious gems in the solid marble structure.

This is what you see when you get close to the Aramco compound entrance in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. All of the highway signs are written in both Arabic and English, which makes it nice for the foreigners living in the area. The other interesting thing about taking photos in Saudi is that the sun is so bright that all of the photos always look washed out.

This is what happens when it only rains one day a year as all of the roads turned into rivers. This photo was taken from the front of our house.

Our oldest son was really worried about the water level as it kept rising and getting closer to coming in our house. One of the interesting things about living in Saudi for two years was that our boys got used to the constant sun and when we returned to Houston, they were both scared of thunder and lighting and rain.

This is a typical photo in Saudi as the sun was so bright it was hard to take a reasonable photo with our simple camera. This was the road on the way to the beach that always amused us as the hump in the road was hardly a hill and definitely not dangerous. I think the sign was there as people tried to pass on the hill and maybe one day in the past someone got hurt.

We saw camels everytime we drove to the beach. Sometimes there were on the road and other times they were just off the road. Most of the time we never saw anyone around them. A couple of times we saw a camel herder walking among them.

This was a typical sight with the mother camel and baby right next to the road. It just happened they were standing next to our favorite sign. This was the back way to the beach and at times the road was covered with sand. Everyone I knew traveled on this road as it was definitely much shorter and going by the non-abandoned road. If the sand was deep on the road then we would turn around and go by the normal road.

This was right across from the entrance to the public beach that we visited. There always seemed to be people in the sand dunes looking around no matter how hot the temperature was that day. Most of the Saudis had four wheel vehicles just so they could wander off the road. The ground around the electric pole was the typical hard crusty soil seen all over the area around Dhahran.

For an afternoon in Bangalore, I took a friend's son bowling which of itself was a major culture shock for me to see in India. That was until I saw the Domino's Pizza along the way near downtown Bangalore. It required a photo as I just was not expecting to see it.

As we zipped along the Ring Road around Bangalore on the way to see friends, it seemed like everywhere we looked we saw new houses being built. I liked the roman architecture used for this house, but there were many more new ones being all around it. The house next to it seemed a bit close to be building another house. I returned to this spot several years later and the whole section of the Ring Road turned into a super crowded freeway along with traffic jams.

One of the people I visited while in Bangalore had some Jain friends, so he took me by this Jain meeting hall in the heart of Bangalore. We also visited a nearby jeweler who was a Jain to talk to him about this building and the Jain saints he had on his wall behind his desk. I really wanted to see the giant Lord Bahubali at Shravanabelagola, but I ran out of time.

While visiting a friend in downtown Bangalore, we met at the Barton Centre. I really liked the granite rock used for the building and the inlaid marble elephant made it look all the better.

As the morning light appeared as we entered Kerala on my overnight trip from Bangalore to Kovalam, Kerala this is what I saw. The green rice fields among the hills was very scenic to me.

In addition to the green rice fields, the date and coconut palms were everywhere. Except for the hills this really reminded me of the green West Bengal I had lived in many years before.

On the train from Bangalore to Kovalam I tried to take photos from the train door. This one was interesting in that I was used to seeing small Hindu shrines all over north India, but I had never seen a Christian shrine like this anywhere in India before.

This house was visible from the train and shows how the original house has been changed to have a metal roof above the house which is bigger than the original. Kerala really was like a jungle in that it was green everywhere.

All along the train ride along the western coast of Kerala by train, I saw houses like this one. When I asked people around me on the train, they all said that houses like this were the result of workers in the Middle East sending money home which was saved and used to create mansions.

This was one of the many stops we made in Kerala on the express train from Bangalore. I liked the train signs in Kerala as the were written in Malayalam, Hindi and English. I was used to seeing the same yellow and black train signs in the north, but the curly letters of the south Indian languages was always an interesting sight for me.

This was taken from my room at our final destination of Kovalam beach. We only had a short visit before returning to Bangalore the next morning. I went for a swim in the half moon shaped bay waters. The shape of the beach caused some seriously powerful waves, so I did not stay in long.

On a subsequent trip to India, I arrived in Bangalore and then flew with a friend to Hyderabad. He scheduled a whole day for me to explore Hyderabad while he visited close friends. Our first stop was a Salar Jung but they prohibited any photographs, so I wil have to rely on my memories for what I saw. Our second stop was at Charminar gates in the old city of Hyderabad. It provided a great location for photos of the ancient gate.

This was the same Charminar gate from a different side and angle. It is actiually very colorful. It is no longer used as a gate as traffic is no longer allowed to go though it. I consider it a trourist trap to pay to go up into the gate itself, but I did it anyway!

My last tourist stop was the Golcunda Fort about an hour long city bus ride from the old Hyderabad city. We entered by bus into the area through ancient wooden gates that I should have photographed but I was not expecting to actually ride through them. This was the first sight I saw once inside the Golcunda Fort grounds.

The top part of the fort on the left hand side of this photo is actually the highest point in the fort. After walking down these rock steps, I looked back up to where we had been and saw this amazing sight. The whole fort was built around the rocky hill.

This photo was from the top of Golcunda Fort looking down on the Hindu temple near the top, which was built right between these two unique rocks.

I really like how this photo came out as it was near the top and looking down on Hyderabad in the valley below through one of the many arch ways.

At the foot of the Golcunda Fort was a series of very nice tombs that are like minature Taj Mahals for each of the kings that ruled in the Golcunda Fort. They were called the Qatab Shah tombs. the tombs were not kept up as well as the grounds around the Taj Mahal, but the architecture was very nice. This was the largest tomb and had great lattice work. You can see the man standing in the door way to give an idea of the size of this tomb.

This is the back side of the tomb from the previous photo. Because of the time of day we were there, this photo came out quite nice in that you can see the lattice work details.