Pretty cool weekend
The weekend was good to me. Friday, the girl and I went out with friends to catch opening night of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". It had to have been the first time since I was about 16 years old that I saw a movie opening night. I'm not what you would call a "people person". This movie (and group of friends) was worth it.
The movie itself was really good (unfortunately, not "great" IMNSF*INGHO)*. I knew it would be difficult, if not impossible, to capture a full book's worth of Douglas Adams' flowing, fantastic dialogue in a 2 hour movie. And I was right. But they did a good job of getting the overall feel of the movie right, and put together a totally entertaining movie. The cast was really good too, tho I wish Mos Def would have been a bit better as Ford Prefect. He seemed too flat.
Saturday I hit a Summit Point, WV raceway for the Ferrari Maserati of Washington "track event". I attended one last year and found it to be a good opportunity for some photography (i.e. subject matter you don't find in the wild all that often). A "track event" is like a race, but nobody is officially racing. All the really rich guys take their really expensive cars out, and drive really, really fast around a race track. Since there's no competition to it, people don't feel like they have to drive their expensive cars like Mario Andretti.
I spent the day wandering the track area from end to end, and side to side (I put in about 4 miles of walking by day's end). Only once or twice getting yelled at for being too close to the action (ie: nearly on the track :). After a bunch of hours of cars, I decided to walk over to the far track to check out a motorcycle race that was happening there. I had a limited area in which to shoot, but I managed to get a few cool shots (missing the two crashes by seconds each time, damnit). I've only processed three photos so far, but you can see them on my Pbase gallery. I may put one or two over on eighteenpercent.net, but I'm not sure they're up to snuff for that gallery. I'm trying to post ony my favorite stuff there, and my more mediocre/snapshot/photojournalism (in my dreams) stuff on Pbase.
Sunday, the kid's lacrosse game was cancelled, so I took the girl and the kid over for a ride at Wakefield. Up to this point, most of their off-road riding had been limited to the cinder path around Burke Lake. I had planned to stick mostly to the creek trail (didn't occur to me how swampy it would be). After a lap on there, the girls seemed to want to keep going, so I decided we'd try hitting the new singletrack.
That went pretty well considering the newness of the riders. From the far end of the park (where the creek trail ends) we climbed part of the power line trail, to the point where it cuts back into the woods. We then connected with the new singletrack and finished the loop clockwise. In the end, the girl said she wasn't a fan of that part of the ride. I'm not sure what the kid's thoughts were, tho she didn't seem to hate it, but she was pretty exhausted by the end. We may have to build up our skills before tackling it again.
* In My Not So F*cking Humble Opinion :)
