Road trip finished; now it's readers' turn

For 12 weeks this summer, I traveled the region's roadways with my camera, bent upon discovery.

Inevitably, visual surprises emerged because they were there and because I was looking, whether the carefree joy of two boys fishing at sunset in the Pine Barrens, or the dignity of Boyertown's soldier-bear statue.

"Scene on the Road" also allowed me to become more connected with readers - people who like to get out and experience the region and love taking pictures while they're at it.

This, the last column of the summer, features your road-trip photos. Some were taken along the usual byways; others on routes "less traveled by," to quote New England poet Robert Frost, that sometimes made "all the difference."

Michael Kimble, on a road trip to Vermont, found Frost's summer cabin. He described it as "beautiful, secluded, and peaceful . . . accessible only by an unmarked dirt road that must be taken [pun intended] for a half-mile and then a trail walked for about 100 yards."

Lisa Polidora likes to photograph nature in the wildlife-rich waters around Cape May. She "loves watching the wildlife interacting" and goes a few times a week to Lake Lilly, across the road from the Cape May Lighthouse, where she caught a frog on a lily pad.

(On my blog you can also see her portrait of a muskrat. "That one in particular was very friendly and wasn't bothered by me at all," she wrote.)

Terry O'Brien observed that "many people don't know that the New Jersey Pine Barrens is within an hour of Philadelphia." He took an Oswego River kayak trip after an August storm raised the water level a foot. "We were the only people on the river and if you stopped paddling, there was no sound - no traffic, no airplanes, even the birds were still."

A couple of jackets hanging on nails caught the eye of Diana Keat at Mascot Roller Mills near Leola in Pennsylvania Dutch country. "A wonderful place to visit," she wrote, "stepping back in history even for just a few minutes. These clothes caught my eye on account of the way they were hung and how it just added life to the mill."

Still life.

"Stuck" on the roadside with a broken-down van, Becky Bryan, on a mission trip to a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota, became "fascinated by the rapidly changing . . . cloud shadows [that] would sweep across the prairie, turning the mundane into spectacular and back to mundane again."

If not for the engine trouble, "I never would have witnessed this ever changing beauty," she reflected.

I plan to continue to blog occasionally, talking with you about photography as we all enjoy our own journeys.