Half Day Off from our Vacation

Northwest Return Travelog #15
Holiday Inn in Clarkston, WA - Sun, 1 Aug 2021. 10pm.

"I need a vacation to recover from my vacation!" How many times have you heard someone say that? How many times have you said it yourself? I've said it so many times I've lost count. But I don't just say it, I do something about it.

One thing I do is plan to get home early. Sometimes that's a full day early. Other times it's just getting home before dinnertime the last day of vacation so I have, at minimum, time to unpack, unwind, and get a healthy night's sleep before returning to work the next morning.

Another technique I use occasionally is to take time off from activity during the trip. A slow day, or a slow part of a day, now and then lets me rebuild my energy so the trip remains invigorating and not tiring.

The thing is, it's hard choosing to take time off from taking time off. We working stiffs, at least in the US, don't get a lot of paid time off to start with. It's natural to want to maximize every day available. That's why I save the latter technique above, taking a quiet day or half-day during the trip, as a reasonable Plan B for when things go wrong.

Well, stuff went wrong this trip. That's why we took a half day off day and spent time relaxing at the pool instead of hiking.



What went wrong? Well, as I explained in talking about "anchor" activities in my previous blog, 1) a whole big hike we wanted to do this weekend is on fire, and 2) Palouse Falls was... not as awesome as it could've been in better weather and without smoke clouds hanging low everywhere.

The upshot of these conditions is that we got back to town around 2pm today. We debated whether to try going out in the opposite direction for another alternative hike we'd located in our guidebooks. Ultimately we decided that would have us out too late tonight and would entail too much driving relative to the amount of hiking, plus it would still be under cloudy and smoke-laden skies. So we've chosen to take it easy in town instead.

What does "taking it easy" mean, on vacation? Well, first we ate a leisurely meal at a restaurant. It took several tries but we did find one with comfortable outdoor seating nobody was using. (Everyone else was inside, 100% not wearing masks, because of course there isn't still a pandemic and this isn't one of the areas in the country with the highest rate of infection or anything. 🙄)

Back in Blech

Next we hung out by the hotel's pool for a while. The water in the pool felt weirdly cold as the air was cooler today than the past few days so we didn't swim, but the hot tub was really nice for a soak. Then we sat out on the lounge chairs drying off and enjoying the "fresh" air.

Once we'd had about as much of the "fresh" air as our lungs could comfortably filter we retreated indoors to the air conditioned comfort and non-gagging-ness of our room.

Our room has a private balcony, a minor upgrade I finagled when we arrived late Thursday night. On any other trip we would've sat out there multiple times already, but between the heat and smoke here it's just not pleasurable. Once again this evening we hid indoors instead, me stretching out with my computer to catch up on these blogs, and Hawk watching a bit of TV.

Touring Spokane's Flower Garden

Northwest Return Travelog #16
Spokane, WA - Mon, 2 Aug 2021. 2pm.

I've explained in my past couple blogs how I consider it important when traveling to have a few runner-up plans, or at least a sense of reasonable alternatives, in case Plan A goes south. With wildfires, heavy smoke, and challenging weather some of our plans this weekend have gone... up in smoke. One of the ideas on our runner-up list was visiting the flower gardens at Manito Park in Spokane. Though even those went slightly sideways.

"I want to see the lilac garden," Hawk insisted. Except when we got there this afternoon none of the lilac bushes were blooming. That whole section of the park looked half dead. Fortunately almost everything else was in bloom. We parked at the Japanese garden and started there.



After a short stroll through the Nishinomiya Tsutakawa garden we headed back out the gate and walked up the hill toward the park's rose garden.



As you can see in the distance of the photo above the weather was not exactly great. It was warm and a bit muggy, and the sky was shrouded with a combination of clouds and thick smoke. How can you tell the difference between smoke and clouds? Both are gray above, but the smoke is especially apparent near ground level when looking 100m away. Still, we were here for the gardens. We tried not to let the weather and smoke detract too much from the experience.

Photography Lesson in Real Time

I started taking a lot of pictures of individual flowers in this area. There are so many colorful varieties! As I reviewed the first half dozen or so in my camera, though, I found the pictures were... off. I have a nice camera, nice lenses, and I know how to use them.... What could be wrong?

What was wrong was I was trusting the camera when I needed to trust myself instead. Specifically, my ability to know what to focus on and then actually focus on it. Here's a side-by-side comparison that shows the difference:



In the view on the left the camera is set to autofocus. In auto mode the camera picks out something with high contrast and focuses on it. In a flower close-up that might be the edge of a leaf or a prominent isolated feature such as a stem in the background. Not desirable! On the right I've switched the camera into manual focus mode and I've nailing the focus on the pistil. Much better!

BTW, the reason exact focus is so critical in these pictures is I'm shooting with a lens with a fairly wide aperture. In technical terms it's f/2.8. At that setting, and when shooting close-up, there's very shallow depth of field. Having the focus point off by even half an inch can make a huge difference. Half and inch is literally the difference in the composite above. If you shoot at a much smaller aperture, which is about all that's available with smartphone cameras, your focus isn't as sensitive to small differences. You also won't see those blurry background unless you use post effects to put them in.



Now, knowing what to do and doing it 100% of the time are different things. In the pic above I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't get the bee in perfect focus. Partly that's because the damn thing moves! But when I zoom in on the full size original I see that the hairs on the bee's hind segment are in focus while the eyes are slightly out of focus. Yes, that's half an inch again— and it can seem like a mile!

Enough shop talk; back to the gardens.



Manito Park isn't all rose gardens. The rose garden is only one section of the park. There's also this traditional garden area, which I believe dates to the park's creation in 1904. (In the Western US that counts as old!)



Watching people of different ages enjoying the park I thought about what it was that I was enjoying. Seeing children here, especially, reminded me that when I was a kid I would've gotten bored after about 5 minutes. What's different now?

Partly it's that as an adult, especially as a middle age adult, I'm okay with taking it easy more of the time. But mostly it's the photography. Photography is how I engage with places like this.



There's the challenge of making a great pictures, like I wrote about above with that focus comparison. There's the joy of practicing and skill and getting it right. And there's the fact that exploring an area with a camera encourages trying different perspectives.