Wanderlust Wednesday

If you know me at all, you know that I love taking pictures and as such go a little overboard with my camera.  Thank you God for digital cameras, haha.  So I am going to try every Wednesday to just give you a little bit of information, with a picture if possible, on a different travel destination, restaurant, interesting place to visit, etc.  Whatever comes to my mind in the week that I think you might be interested in learning more about.

Today's destination is going to be a place called Wolf Park, in Battle Ground, Indiana.  Wolf Park is a behavioral research and education facility, dedicated to well you guessed it, wolves!!

Ruedi from Wolf Park







It is a facility that is open to the public during certain times of the year and they have a captive wolf pack that they study to learn more about these beautiful animals.  The really neat thing about this place is that you can sign up for a photography seminar where you can actually go into the enclosure with these animals and spend a few hours photographing them.  I mean it was really, really neat.  The wolves will come and say hi to you, but mostly it is just for you to take your camera out and use it.  I think I took close to like 500 pictures in the time that I was there.  So much fun!  I will probably feature this in another post, but for right now I encourage you to check them out if you are a wolf lover at all.  These are just a sampling of the multitudes of pictures that I took and I hope to go back again to take more.

Woatan looking down at something of interest

Ruedi taking a quick dip

The Ways I Like to Travel

So far 2012 has started off on a good note and I am excited to be making my travel plans for the year.  I'm not one to just start making plans at the beginning of the year, I'm constantly researching different places to travel.  Travel research fascinates me.  You can probably ask me a question about just about anywhere in the U.S and I can give you travel tips for it.  It's just the way I'm built.

Ideally in my travel life I would have three more major vacations, with various long weekends throw in for good measure.  Now does this always happen?  Of course not, in fact rarely does it, but ideally this is what I would LOVE to be able to do.  I would have a solo trip, family vacation, and couple's vacation.

My solo trip would be one of getting into the Word and concentrating on my photography.  It would be a time of reflection, prayer, and quietness.  Just me, God and my camera.  Haven't done this yet, but hope to this year.  Family vacation is what it implies, the fam and I take off and do all those fun family things together.  My couple's vacation would be for my husband and I, alone, to reconnect with each other and enjoy each others company, rekindle the spiciness of being newly married again :).  My husband farms so getting him "away from the office" is a literal thing we have to do, as in he needs to get away from the land, which would include our house.  He enjoys doing this, but takes a little convincing sometimes.  The long weekends would be random places I visit that are quick and easy to get to, fun, and usually include a zoo, aquarium, or museum, and/or a park of some kind.  We live in a very rural area so those kinds of things are not very close to us and require some extra planning to be able to visit them.

So there you have it, the types of trips that I like to take.  More details of this year's travel plans will be coming soon.

Flower garden butterfly

Photo of the Month

On my photography website there is a place where I can check and see the stats of my galleries and photos.  it's really neat because I get to see how many "hits" each gallery gets and even as specific as which photograph gets the most hits.  Without a doubt my most popular pictures are those of my adorable huskies, which is awesome, because I really enjoy taking pictures of the puppies.

This months' most visited travel picture is an interesting one to me.  It is from my Hawaii album which doesn't surprise me.  I mean who doesn't LOVE Hawaii right haha?  The interesting thing to me is that it is not a very scenic picture, but something different.  Check it out.

Bird at the Dolphin Quest Aquarium

This picture was taken at the Dolphin Quest Aquarium on the Big Island of Hawaii.  We mainly went to this aquarium because I really, really, really, really wanted to swim with the dolphins.  My options were an open sea experience with no guarantee of a dolphin sighting of Dolphin Quest.  I chose Dolphin Quest because I didn't want to take the chance of not being able to swim with a dolphin.  Looking back on it now, I would probably do the open sea adventure if I had to do it over again.  The dolphin adventure was great, but how much cooler would it have been to have been in the open ocean and had wild dolphins swim and play with you! 

When I took this picture I was looking out to see and checking out the new island that was coming up out of the ocean, which happens in Hawaii because of the active volcanoes on the island.  This bird happened to land on that neat looking branch and I just snapped the picture.  It wasn't even a bird that was from the aquarium, but a wild bird outside of the park.  Thank you for checking out my travel photos! 

Travel Plans 2012 Forthcoming....

Updated travel list for 2012 will be forthcoming soon!!!  I have been lax in blogging, but I am hoping to get back into the swing of things here shortly.  Until then enjoy this picture of springtime!!