Dragon Fall Run 2019

Our S2000 club has 2 Tail of the Dragon trips every year, a spring one and a fall one. The Tail of the Dragon is the nickname for US 129 on the Tennessee/North Carolina state line. It's 11 miles and 318 curves of fun for sports cars and motorcycles.

Our official DFR 2019 logo, many thanks to Aaron who creates the most amazing unique logos for every trip.

I was a day early so I spent some time driving on my own. I had a chance to go down all the side roads I had passed many times. This is driving across the top of Fontana dam in the early morning. The fog was rolling up and over the dam leaving a kind of tunnel to drive through.

Fontana Lake in the early morning fog.

One the side roads I found, that's Fontana Dam in the background.

Part of the club on the new Foothills Parkway near Smokey Mountains National Park.

View from Foothills Parkway. It run along the top of a ridge with views like this on both sides.

Dry Falls on the road to Highlands NC.

Dry Falls are interesting because you can walk behind them.

Bridal Falls on the road to Highlands NC. You used to be able to park under them but they closed the road several years ago.

No drive is complete without a group photo.

Everywhere you look you're reminded of why people come here from all over to drive the Dragon.

Stopped for lunch at Tellico Grains, an awesome bakery we never miss a chance to eat at.

Stopped for a break on the Cherohala Skyway. The road was closed because of a motorcycle accident.

They had to bring in a couple of helicopters to fly out the injured bikers. Hopefully they were ok.

Part of the crew on a midnight drive on the Foothills Parkway. If you look close they are all holding cell phones or mini flashlights. After this photo we turned off the lights and they did some light painting with their phones and flashlights.

I setup the camera on a tripod, set the shutter for 30 seconds and let them draw letters and numbers and this was the result. It actually took a bunch of tries to get a readable result. The first couple of tries they were different sizes or backwards, etc.

Since the first one went so well we tried something more complicated, Ken "hearts" S2000. Ken is our fearless leader and this is the best result we could manage.

The trip home early sunday morning was beautiful with fog in many of the lower valleys.

Headlands International Dark Sky Park

Last fall there was a weekend when it was predicted there would be good chance of seeing the Aurora Borealis (northern lights) in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan. We decided to take a shot and drove to the Headlands dark sky park about 4 hours north of our house. We stopped in Mackinaw City to eat dinner, do some shopping, and buy fudge.

This isn't what we saw, this is a sign at the park with what we hoped to see.

We found a nice spot on the shore of Lake Michigan and setup our chairs and blankets and hoped for the best.

This the event center at the park. There was a wedding reception going which was a surprise since we expected the park to be completely dark when the sun goes down. As it turns out all events have to end by dusk so they can turn the lights off.

We saw geese which we can see at home at almost anytime.

We saw a beautiful sunset over the lake.

Once it got dark we saw fireworks across the bay.

We saw the moon.

More fireworks.

And finally once it was completely dark we saw stars, lots and lots and stars. However we never saw any northern lights and about midnight we packed up and drove home in the middle of night. The highlight of the trip was the fudge.

Fawns

We had a doe and a couple of fawns in the yard, they're so cute when they still have their spots.

Ok, this isn't a deer but it was in the yard when I was out photographing the deer.

Also not a deer but it was buzzing the neighborhood while I was out in the yard. I'm pretty sure this is a B-25 Mitchell.

One of the pair out fawns, I tried to get them both in the same shot but I was lucky if I could get one to look at me at a time.

I did get mom and one of the fawns to pose.

Almost got all three in the photo even if two are out of focus.

It was almost as if they were toying with me, when one looked at me the other would look away. This was as close as I got to both actually looking.