Looking Back – Wandering Dawgs

Lens Artists Photo Challenge #368 – Looking Back to Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #106: Autumn

October 6, 2025Posted in PhotographyTagged Athens Georgia, autumn, Cades Cove, fall colors, leaf peeping, Lens-Artists, Looking Back, Photo Challenge39 Comments

John is Looking Back to challenge #106 – Autumn. We don’t get fall colors in coastal Georgia so if I want to see the autumn leaves we have to take a trip north of here.

Autumn is also college football season. Some of you know that Henry and I are huge Georgia Bulldogs college football fans. We spent many falls attending the Bulldogs home football games in Athens, Georgia. We have also made several fall trips to see Georgia play in away games. It was fun taking trips to combine football with searching for autumn colors.

On our way to Lexington, Kentucky for a football game we searched for fall colors along the way. We stopped in Sevierville, Tennessee where the colorful autumn leaves wowed us on a drive in Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In the following gallery the first three photos are from that drive in Cades Cove. The final image shows colorful leaves in Lexington.

One year we camped on West Point Lake in Georgia on our way to Auburn, Alabama for a football game. We were treated to some beautiful fall colors around the lake.

Another year we traveled to Columbia, Missouri and Little Rock, Arkansas to attend football games. The autumn colors were glorious in Tennessee and around Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.

For Thanksgiving one year we spent the weekend in Athens, Georgia to attend a home game against instate rival Georgia Tech. The trees on the University of Georgia campus and in downtown Athens were showing their peak colors.

Last week our guest host Joanne’s challenge was “Everyone should see this”. I enjoyed seeing all of photos of many incredible places from around the world.

I hope you will join in for this week’s challenge. Be sure to tag your post with Lens-Artists and include a link back to John’s post Lens-Artists #368 – Looking Back at #106 Autumn.

Be sure to check back on Saturday, October 11 at noon eastern time for Ann-Christine’s challenge.

For information on how to join the Len-Artists challenge please click here.

Every Day is a Gift

Lens Artists Photo Challenge #355 – Creativity Looking Back to #42

June 30, 2025Posted in Georgia, PhotographyTagged creativity, Lens-Artists, Looking Back, Photo Challenge, Public Art, Tybee Island, Tybee Turtles36 Comments

Ann-Christine is our host for the first “Looking Back” topic and she explains the challenge like this: “This week we are starting to look back… each month or maybe every 6 weeks, one of us in the LAPC – team will repeat a PREVIOUSLY USED subject for the week. We will share a link to the old post, and then create a new post on the same subject. This will also give us all a chance to address challenges we may not have done before.”

Ann-Christine is asking us to look back to the topic #42 Creativity from April, 2019. I didn’t start participating in the challenges until later that year so I don’t have a previous post to look back on. You can visit Ann-Christine’s #42 post here.

Tybee Island, Georgia is home to many creative artists. In 2006 a few residents came up with the idea to display turtle statues painted by local artists around the island. In 2007 I photographed most of the turtles that were here at that time. Sometime later some of the turtles were auctioned off to raise money for sea-turtle research and preservation. For more about the project please visit Public Art on Display – Tybee Island.

I’ve always thought I didn’t have a creative bone in my body. When I was in school I was terrible in art classes. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t sculpt. I got the idea for this challenge when I saw one of the turtle statues on a morning drive around Tybee Island.

The featured image is the turtle that greets everyone at the Welcome to Tybee Island sign. I photographed it and the following image this morning.

The following gallery are some of the turtles I photographed in 2007. Each turtle was done by a different artist and each turtle is unique. These statues show the creativity of the different artists who made them. A few are still located around the island.

Last week I enjoyed all of the great responses to Anne’s challenge Reflections. The Lens-Artists team is taking a break next weekend so be sure to check back on Saturday, July 12 at noon Eastern Time when our guest host SH will be hosting the challenge. And as always, please remember that Every Day is a Gift.

Many thanks to Ann-Christine for this challenge Lens-Artists #355 – Looking Back to Creativity

For information on how to join the Len-Artists challenge please click here.

Lens Artists Photo Challenge #320 – Looking Back

October 19, 2024Posted in Photography, Road TripTagged Family trip, Lens-Artists, Looking Back, National Parks, Photo Challenge, Summer trip25 Comments

Sophia has challenged us to “Look back at things you love(d) in your life, things that have happened, places you visited that you’d like to experience again. Anything, really, as long as it’s part of your treasured memories.” I had fun going through boxes of old photos for this challenge. I found too many to include so I decided to focus on some “firsts” from my travels.

I inherited the travel bug from my father. He was a career U.S. Air Force officer whose job required moving quite often. Every summer we spent our summer vacations traveling to visit grandparents in two different states.

My first big trip that didn’t revolve around visiting grandparents was in the summer of 1959 when I was eight years old. As we traveled from the East Coast to California we passed through many different landscapes and explored several National Parks. Here I am with my Mom and my brothers at Yellowstone Lake.

My first big trip with my husband and children was when the kids were 13 and 9. We saw many fantastic places as we traveled to and from the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. A hike on the Bright Angel Trail was the highlight of our Grand Canyon adventure.

I was 16 years old the first time I flew in an airplane. We flew from New York to Rome on our way to My Dad’s next assignment at a small base near Brindisi, Italy. We traveled to many places around Europe during the two years Dad was stationed there. This image is of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

Wandering Dawgs took our first RV trip in 2006 in our brand new fifth wheel. We found beauty every where we went as we traveled west to explore many of the western National Parks.