Photos around Cape Archives

February 4, 2013

The Delta Windmill

I don’t know if this is the Allen Henderson windmill I shot in the spring of 1967 on the Cape side of Delta along 25. There was another windmill missing all its blades about a tenth of a mile down the road that could have been it. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

The 1967 windmill

Here’s the 1967 photo. You can read more about the Allen Henderson Farm in my 2010 post.

Mother and I cruised down to check on storm damage at Dutchtown – we might have lost a piece of tin off one of the buildings – then we decided to see where the tornado touched down in Delta. The F1 tornado lifted the roof off a brick building, held it in the air over a car wash, then dropped it on a house. It missed all the normal tornado magnets – mobile homes. It could have been a lot worse.

On the way back, I saw the windmill spinning lazily and did a u-turn. There was no shoulder, so I had to park and walk about a quarter mile. The temps were in the 40s for a change, so I worked up a bit of a sweat under my coat on the way out with the wind behind me. The walk back, with a brisk wind in my face, was a bit chillier.

Not happy with the photos

I didn’t shoot anything that I liked as well as the 1967 photo. The 18-55mm lens I use on my Nikon D3100 is great because it’s light and adequate for most things, but it wasn’t the piece of glass I needed today. My first shot was with these red berries in the foreground. They aren’t strong enough to carry the picture and the windmill is too small.

Similar shot isn’t much better

I walked down the fenceline because I liked the tangle of weeds in the foreground, but the composition is still not quite right. If I had moved to the right just a little more, the fence post would have shifted to the left and it would have balanced the windmill better. Focus and depth of field is hard to judge with this lens, too. The focusing ring on the lens is tiny; it’s clearly designed for folks who are always going to use it on automatic.

Compositionally, the top shot is the best of the current pictures, but it would have been improved if I could have used a longer telephoto like in the original B&W photo. There are some interesting things happen with that tangle of brush around it that would be worth exploring. Oh, yes, and some cows would have helped.

Maybe I should have just kept on driving instead of doing the u-turn.

January 28, 2013January 28, 2013

Foggy Mississippi Morning

Mother, Friend Jan and I were making the normal tourist loop: Thebes, Horseshoe Lake, Cairo and Kentucky Lake when we spotted fog swirling around a work boat just north of Thebes. It was like the fog was following the channel. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Thebes railroad bridge built in 1905

We followed it downstream to the Thebes Landing RV Park and Campground where it disappeared under the 1905 Thebes railroad bridge just as a long freight crossed the river.

River made safer

The extraordinary low water this year has made the Thebes stretch of the Mississippi particularly dangerous because it brings the bottom of the barges perilously close to rock pinnacles. The Corps of Engineers was originally planning to blast them from the river, but they found that most could be removed with equipment like this.

I was amused to read panicky letters to the editor from people who were sure that the blasts would trigger another New Madrid Earthquake. Those worrywarts don’t realize the number of contractors, farmers and quarries in the area that are blasting every day.

January 28, 2013December 14, 2015

Lambert’s Cafe: Home of Throwed Rolls

For some reason or another, I’ve never been a big fan of Lambert’s Cafe, which bills itself as The Home of Throwed Rolls, but the place has a huge following. Mother, Friend Jan and I were getting a little empty while we were on a trek to the Stoddard County Confederate Memorial in Bloomfield, so we decided to pop over to the tourist attraction for Jan’s benefit.

License tags everywhere

I can remember going to Lambert’s when it was a small place. This one is huge with all kinds of interesting artifacts – particularly license tags – covering everything.

Throwed rolls

When things got busy on May26, 1976, servers started tossing rolls across the room to customers. It has become as famous as flinging fish at Pike Place Market in Seattle. I’m not big on gimmicks, so that’s probably one of the reasons I’m not overly fond of the place. It IS good fun for folks who like that kind of thing.

The cafe’s website says they bake on average 520 dozen 5-inch in diameter rolls a day, for a grand total of 2,246,400 individual rolls a year. It doesn’t say how many of them aren’t caught.

Huge servings

I ordered the XXL Center Cut Ham. The site says they served 52,322 pounds of ham, country ham and pork steak a year. I think it all must have been on my plate. I wish I had taken the picture before I started carving. It was nearly half an inch thick, and as big as the platter. I brought home at least half of it.

Photo gallery throwed together

Here’s a gallery of photos taken in and around Lambert’s Cafe. I could pretend that I had done a bunch of research, but I’ll send you directly to the source for interesting factoids about the place. They LOVE keeping stats. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

January 19, 2013

Ducking My Responsibilities

Ya’ll are a tough audience. If I skip a day, I’m sure to hear from Mother who wants to know why I’m “slacking off.”

Now, it’s Friend Shari that’s taking me to task, although a bit more diplomatically: “So, does the appearance of the short blogs mean you’re packing to head to Cape? When are you leaving?”

The answer is “Yes.” I’m trying to scan and print a bunch of photos from my Ohio years to show to the Athens County Historical Society and Museum in Athens, Ohio. The game plan is to leave West Palm Beach on January 20, stop in Athens for a couple of days, then head on over to Cape until the first week of March.

The duck? Your guess is as good as mine. It was on the same roll as the cute cat. There’s a good reason why nobody has seen it in almost half a century. You can click on it to make it larger.