May Vacation

So, every once in a while I am allowed to get away from the daily grind and take a vacation. Though not as far traveling and glamorous (as the 3 weeker last year), this vacation was much enjoyed and photo evident as well. It began with seeing things like this that I just had to get photos of.

Need to buy any "Wud"?

When we got to the place we were going to stay at for the week we were a little disappointed. That fixed we were pleasantly pleased to find this view just outside our backdoor.

The bottom one was of Little River on the way back to the room one night. Nice little haze hanging over the river and I'd never tried to capture that on film before.

The rest of these I'm just going to throw out there. We've been to Cades Cove, I don't know like 6-7 times and have never seen more than a few deer and a squirrel. Our luck did a 360 this time as seen in the pics. We rode through the cove on two different days and were treated to mama bear and cubs each time. It's the coolest thing to see your first black bear cub and photo it. Altogether we saw probably 13 bear from those two trips. Not bad. If you went back right now one would probably be treated to the same. Bumper crop of cubs this year from what the rangers have stated.

This is a little of what was at Cable Mill at the back of Cades Cove.

The ranger informed all those watching and photographing this one that it's very rare to actually see a mother black bear nursing in the open like this. Sweet. Lucky us.

Of course these cubs were still learning how to climb. Man they're so small it was great to just watch.

The above pic was our last bear siting and this mama bear had three slightly larger cubs. I snuck around the field through a glad of trees and snapped this from the edge of the field and mama bear looked right up at me. Hmmm, not too bad for like 800 feet away.

If you couldn't tell yet, I'm very much enjoying the Olympus SP 570 UZ I got last year.