I’m starting a new blog series at the end of next week taking you through my adventures from the past year, highlighting some of the sights I witnessed on those combined 13,000-mile road trips. But let’s go back a little earlier than that to explain why I want to create this series.
Visiting Crater Lake to witness the Annular Solar Eclipse in October 2023 proved to me that I could make moments happen. Manifest my dreams, as some might say. That trip was, by all accounts, 6 years in the making, resting solely on the sentiment long-described as: “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” When I proclaimed in 2017 that I wanted to watch the 2023 eclipse from Crater Lake, I hadn’t yet created Sidewalk Science Center, had no idea that I’d own more than a dozen telescopes, or that I’d befriend and bring along four other people, all of us representing five countries.
Six months later, in April 2024, I found myself on a soccer field in a tiny town in Indiana watching the Total Solar Eclipse. Even two months earlier, I didn’t know where I was going to be until a librarian reached out to me on Facebook, and we ended up chatting to the point where she checked with the town’s city hall to see if they had funds to bring me and one of my employees up with telescopes to share with the town. And that’s exactly what happened.
These just two stories of dozens, perhaps hundreds that I could share in just the years spanning 2017 to now. It is incredible to know that these moments in time happened, that I was there, that I created these experiences for myself and to share with others. While the pictures all tell stories on their own and in relation to each other, so much more happened before and behind the scenes that led to those moments.
Then came June 2024, my Arizona road trip….which directly created my Utah road trip…which motivated me just enough to officially create The Hiking Astronomer blog and see if I could sell some prints of landscapes I captured on those trips.
That’s what this post is all about.
I’m a writer, and I am going to tell the stories. I will select an image from each day of those trips and recount the adventure that led to that moment. Some of these photographs are available in my store; some will be just memories to look back on. I may include a video on my YouTube channel recounting some of these. But each day of those trips crafted some new part of whom I am and laid out the stepping stones for the upcoming adventure I am embarking on this summer. Through it all I will be building a new version of myself and preparing for an entirely new life I’ve only dreamed of, but believe I now have the capacity and ability to live.
I will post the first story on May 5th @ 4:30pm, which will focus on May 31st, 2024, the day I left Florida and would be gone for the next three straight weeks. From there, I will run through each day of my trips, abbreviating or combining days as necessary, before moving on to tell stories along my journey through the present.
For prints available in the store, these stories will be cross-linked so you can always reference them and learn how that particular photograph and experience came to be. This is an idea that has been mulling in my mind for months, and I’m excited to finally bring it into creation.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
Read the first post – Embarking with my smile as a mask
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