Pccmmretreat- arriving

OMG!!!!, did I have a great time. I slept like a log last night. I love my bed.
Shepardstown and campus is a beautiful oasis, colonial, and full of wonderful, genuine people.
And there was on the way in, roads lined with honeysuckle, the smell was delightful and the view breathtaking. Synchronous!
I am so glad I went.
I met my friend Mer in Chicago and we flew in to Dulles. We talked all the way there. It was the shortest flight I have ever been on.
I love Mer, she is a sister-friend of mine. I talk to her every week in email and sometimes on the phone. But being with some one in person is so much better. She encourages me when I don’t know if I can do it, holds my hand when I am scared, and helps me laugh when I need to. She loves me for being me, I don’t have to pretend. I love you Mer, I miss you already.
Please go visit her http://www.mereditharnold.com/ and http://mereditharnold.wordpress.com/
We met up with a fellow retreater Darcy (Hi Darcy!!!) and went to get a car and ended up with an upgrade (we thought, we were wrong) and proceeded to drive to the retreat.

I am driving ;-O. Only screwed up once and missed an exit. It was my impatience to get there, so I thought I would go around some slow trucks, don’t they know I have a retreat to get to? Poor Darcy, she probably wondered what she had gotten herself in to. Cackling, laughing, and crazy driving mhwahhhhhhhhh!!!
Got turned around and headed out to West Virginia, gosh what a beautiful drive. It reminds me of ...green!! LOL!! The honeysuckle (did I mention the honeysuckle?) was thick, thick, thick, and from the ground to probably 20-30 feet in the air, for miles and miles. Makes my scrawny little patch of honeysuckle look sad. We passed all kinds of small places and towns, very colonial. I would have taken pictures but I was driving and it probably would have sent poor Darcy over the edge at that point. It was GORGEOUS!
The staff even held over for dinner so the 3 of us could eat. Isn’t that the sweetest thing?
We went up stairs to put our stuff in the workroom and Polly was waiting.
Heidi Spicer, one of the people that pulled this fantastic event off and a beautiful and talented person, made her.
And she was movable. Needless to say she was always in a different position when I came in or left. Who would have done such a thing?

Getting small

This is walking to the stand of flowers.

I like to get small and with a camera that is very easy to do.
I love to focus on the small aspects of life, the textures, and the subtle colors.
I love to use the pictures as components of my digital collages.
I was driving down the road the other day and there is a place where the volunteer honeysuckle is prolific and it is like walking or driving into a perfume shop. It is probably 30 feet long and 10 feet high.

The window was down and I got a whiff.

There is a smudge on my lens, I love this picture.

I have lived here for years and no one planted these, but my grandmother had some on the side of her house ages ago.

Smudge still there.

We get tons of things that grow from seed, from birds that sit on the wires and defecate. LOL!!!From piles of dung grow beautiful things.
I went back to the same spot with my camera and started taking photos of the area.
Smell-o-vision would be wonderful now.
But if you have ever been in a place where there is a ton of this flower it will bring back the fondness and the feel.
In smaller amounts of these flowers, I don't remember the fragrance being this strong.

I figured it out, I can see clearly now the smudge is gone!!!

This is a very close to the road. Eucalyptus seeds.

This is a flower (weed) in the hump in the middle of the road. It is about a 1/4" in diameter.