Llano Railroad Museum

Llano Railroad Museum, originally uploaded by Steve-Gregory.

More from my Flickr stream! :)

Desert Life

Desert life, originally uploaded by Steve-Gregory.

I am particularly proud of this image and I simply wanted to share it on Flickr. Simple as that :)

My work on Schmap.com

Akershus Fortress, Olso, Norway, originally uploaded by Steve-Gregory.

I should have blogged this ages ago!

I recently had one of my photos picked to appear on the Schmap website as part of their Oslo guide. Click here for the web link :-)

As you can imagine I'm very proud!!!

Texon

Texon, originally uploaded by Steve-Gregory.

A ghost town on highway 67, west of San Angelo. I do like the dark & moody image this scene creates. I've more shots of Texon to come..

Texon was indeed a creepy place to visit and a true insight into something long since dead. This is real old time western America that's left untouched for all to witness.

Flickr

Coming back from an awesome road trip vacation in America is always hard. Why does everything here in England now seem so .. crap and expensive!? And how come people seem rude and foul mouthed too? Hmm weird...

Anyhow, I've signed up with Flickr and I'm editing many of my road trip snaps and uploading them for all to see. I love photography and the keen amateur in me is making full use of this excellent website. I just wish my upload speeds where faster!

I'll still be using my web gallery at Apple's MobileMe, so now I am able to pollute two areas on the web all at the same time! lol. Please check me out @ Flickr and MobileMe. Also, I shall be blogging the entire month-long trip at my TravelCrypt website but this will take me AGES due to having other commitments. So keep yer eyes peeled on it!

For all those worried about the future of my Mac/fps/mods website, AppleCrypt Mods. Please don't be! It's not dead and I still have plans for future updates. Please remember that I'm a family man now (with another baby on the way!) so my Mac time is now sadly limited. But updates will come, again, keep yer eyes peeled on this site also!

For what it's worth, all my sites support RSS, making them easy for anyone to follow without having to manually check them out yourself. Go grab a copy of the freeware program 'NetNewsWire' and you'll soon see the benefits of RSS feeds :-)

I'm back !

Miss me? Whattya mean you didn't even know I was away? Sheesh.... Okay never mind then! (sob) Well, we're back from our month-long road trip vacation in mighty Texas.

We've had a fantastic time and got to see many awesome places and meet lots of nice people also. I'll give a run down of our ventures from my travel blog (link here) but don't expect this just yet as I've a zillion things to catch up on first!

Burger tip..

if you're in western Texas and you passing Langtry then you must visit the Langtry Depo. Quite literally the best-ever burgers plus you have a great view of the Rio Grande, Judge Roy Bean and some of the coolest ghost town builders ever! Okay, I'm odd..

Lights Camera Action

We've just become the proud owners of a new camcorder, well, it's our first actually. It's a JVC GZ-MS100 model with SD ram cards rather than tapes, drives, discs or whatever. It's light, small and the battery lasts forever. Even better, we're getting "DVD" quality at 720x576. Sweet!

Hardly "HD", I know.. But my olde Power Mac G5 cannot supposedly handle the codec, due to being a PPC model rather than a spanky new Intel Mac (thanks Apple!).  Not bothered too much, probably couldn't afford an HD camcorder anyhow lol

The main purpose for it is recording our daughter as she grows up plus also our travels around the globe. Should come in handy for our American road trip later in the year.  Talking of road trips, check out my new travel blog - The TravelCrypt (nice name) ;-)

Weekend breaks in the sun

I thought I would share a gorgous picture from our latest weekend away in the English Lake District.  This was a short break to celebrate my parents wedding anniversary and we all had a blast. Great laugh.  Instead of the usual mountainous photo I thought I'd be nice to have a change and show a nice, lovely image of the valley near to Force Crag.  This was also one of the rare moments that the sun came out!

our Oslo trip

We're back from our Oslo trip and boy what a fantastic experience. We loved Norway!

Personally, it's a place that I've always wanted to visit and Oslo is a great start to begin any Scandinavian vacation. The city is clean and quiet whilst home to a ton of great sites to see and many things to do. The people are friendly and polite making this a great place for families and couples alike.

The strangest thing for us was the temperature. One of the reasons Oslo made it onto our shortlist was the expected cooler climate. Not so! Each day was damn hot but it peaked at around 30c on the Saturday. Scorchio!

The sun was still shining late into the evening but it never went completely dark. Even in the early hours of the "night" the Sun reappears after only a couple of hours of this half darkness! Very odd weather that we aren't used to here in England. We loved this and enjoyed the whole experience, of course.

I cannot recommend Oslo, or indeed Norway as a whole, enough to you all. Sure the Taxi's and eating out are expensive but everything else more than makes up for this. We loved Norway and hope to return one day. When we do, Trondheim is next on the list but first we have to visit other places.. what else do we go to work for? Enjoy life!

[ This posting is dedicated to my new nephew, Archie. ]

birthday break

We're back from the Lake District in Cumbria. And I'm annother year older too !

The birthday weekend break in Dubwath went by pretty good. We went on many walks in various parts of the Cumbrian area, Uldale Common, Caldbeck, Loweswater and Winlatter are all now favorite places of ours. However, the B&B itself wasn't too great, we received a very cold greeting and then the evening bar was a huge disappointment. Try getting a drink when they are ignoring their reception bell. Hmm not very good at all :-(

So watch out if you want to stay in this town - I don't want to publicly knock these guys. Perhaps they had a bad week? lol yeah right! Contact me if you need to know the name...

Anyhow, they didn't spoil our time, I only wish we had longer... But isn't that always the case? Oh well only 7 more weeks until our next vacation!

The picture was taken from Winlatter Forest and is shows the Skiddaw mountain range with Dodds Woods at the foot. Quite a spectacular site.

feeling a little sad

This year, April is a strange month for us both. It's the first time in a long while that we cannot afford to visit America and have one of our fantastic road trip adventures. We are sad to think that this time last year we was in Las Vegas and began our vacation by heading south through Arizona and California... The previous year we started in Houston and enjoyed the start of that vacation traveling through central Texas heading west into New Mexico.

Sigh.... Happy times! Okay this year is very different due to our new family addition, our very own little baby girl. Life's changed so much and we're both very happy, but a little tiny part of us is still missing America!

The picture above is obviously from the Grand Canyon, taken last year just before we started an awesome day on Arizona's section of Route 66. This is an amazing part of the Mother Road and we got to visit many touristy places, like the Grand Canyon Caverns and many towns like Peach Springs, Hackberry, Truxton, and eventually Kingman.

Amazing times. We hope to go back sometime in 2010, possibly a road trip vacation of the state of Texas this time? Our fingers are crossed :-)

topsy-turvy world !

This image was taken on our return home from the Lake District, last weekend. We where almost out of the Winlatter area and parked up to take this shot of a very odd weather condition. Very odd indeed, almost as if the world was upside down!

Take a click & a look at the image and you'll see that the valleys where flooded with thick fog all day while everywhere else was enjoying a clear blue sky day. The same happened in other places, like Crummock and Buttermere. So you can imagine our shock when we left for home only to  discovered that it wasn't really a foggy day after all!

We were glad to get a snap or two, I don't think people would have believed us otherwise ;-)

Lakes break

We have just returned from a great weekend of walking in the lakes! Great weather on saturday, like summer! And foggy on sunday, all day. We stayed at coledale inn which is an old georgian and victorian inn, very nice indeed. Sad to be back as this was a break to celebrate our six years together! Happy anniversary diane x x x

Canadian adventures

A good friend of mine "recently" sent me a couple of pictures of his family on vacation around the Province of Alberta, Canada. As you can see from this superb snap, this looks to be a wonderful place on the planet. So beautiful and I do hope he doesn't mind me posting this picture!

We would love to visit Canada in the coming years, maybe when our little KJ is a few more years older though. Somehow I don't think it'll be worthwhile at this time (not that we can afford it! lol)

I've always fancied Alberta, British Columbia and the Alaskan State. This would make a fantastic road trip over a couple of months. Sounds like a plan !

Starting to save.... ;-)

New Mexico

Here's a fantastic picture of us all taken by a kind German tourist in the south west of New Mexico. A day after leaving Tombstone in Arizona, it was a great time and we later went on to visit some awesome places in New Mexico, such as White Sands, Fort Sumner, Lincoln County and the original Las Vegas! We also had the pleasure of a dodgy motel in Capitan, but this turned out to be a great laugh!

Christmas

It's coming Christmas again, everyone's favourite time of year!

Last year was brilliant over xmas itself, we had a great time! We also decided to break the usual traditional mold of spending the new year at home and booked a couple of nights in the Lake District, Cumbria. A small town called Grasmere.

Lovely place and very eerie at this time of year because there wasn't many people about. Esp at night time. Weather wasn't too great, well, it poured down all the time... see attached picture! But we had a great time :-)

Buckles!

My new belt buckles arrived yesterday from www.buckleshop.com and they're incredible Quality made and they also look fantastic to boot!

I just had to buy the Texas one for myself, this was my first State that I travelled as part of our road trip in 2006 and I loved it!!! Idaho is an incredible scenic place and I recently realised that we had nothing from this State, no caps, no T-Shirts, nothing! So this is the reason i also got a idaho buckle..

We bought another two for my dads christmas present. Colorado and California, to mark this years vacation :-)

A great fella called Geoff runs this web site, i highly rec a visit. I'll deff be going back, I want a buckle for each of the 13 States we've visited :)

Bugs!

While on our travels this year in north america we made a stop at an amazing part of the world called white sands in new mexico. An incredible place on planet earth! Heres a close up of the only bug we ever saw here.