Sunday, February 24, 2019

Answer to last week's quiz photo

Although Matt Hysell gave this away with far better photos in his post on Condors' wings, just to complete my blog loop, here are my much more challenging images.


Barely visible, this is the first Andean Condor we saw, before we found the other, actually identifiable, bird below.



Above and below, after a not very long time perching, they took off to soar together.  The gray overtones of both photos is the heavy mist that plagued us the whole trip.


My next post reveals that the sun did come out for at least part of the day.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Yesterday, return from Ecuador

In the rain and sleet I returned from our second trip to Ecuador yesterday morning.  Upon my 5:00 a.m. arrival in Atlanta it was raining.  For the first time ever in my flying life I was the first off the plane and the first to enter the U.S. customs area of the Atlanta airport. I don't know if it was because of this that I was also randomly selected to be scrutinized more closely by custom officials.  The custom officer was either very pleased, or sorely disappointed, when he ruffled through my scantily packed suitcase of muddy clothes.  He didn't even bother to check my backpack.  Nevertheless, the whole customs process went very quickly - probably because of my extraordinarily early arrival time - and I was able to consider an earlier flight to Detroit.  I arrived at gate A27 for the 7:25 a.m. departure flight and, after thinking about it a little, paid the $75 extra to get on this flight.  Glad I did.  The flight arrived in Detroit more or less on time and saved me a potential delay if I had instead waited for the departure of my originally planned 9:40 a.m. flight.

Thanks to recent inclement weather in Detroit (reminding drivers to go slower) there were no accidents on the I-94 and my cabbie got me home before mid-morning.  Attention to my little cat, laundry, a couple of phone calls and emails later and then I was downloading and deleting photos.

This year I promised myself that I would be ruthless with my photo deletions and I think I have done a pretty good job of it.  On the other hand I took far fewer photos this year, only about a 1/3 of the number taken last year - more about this later - and so the deletion process seemed much easier.


I return to work tomorrow - bracing myself - but I'll be adding my Ecuador blog entries over the next  days and weeks.

Until next time, the above photo is a quiz photo which I'll answer in my next entry.  Can you find the bird in the photo?  There are many hints.