&hlWe took it easy this morning and J cooked us a big breakfast of Denver omelets, potatoes, and OJ. It was delicious! After I did the dishes, I wrapped the legs of my tripod in Army Digital Camo Form. Camo Form is fantastic stuff! It's a self-cling tape that's perfect for wrapping photo gear because it doesn't leave any residue on the equipment. I had been using it in the Mossy Oak Breakup pattern for years, and J found the Army Digital pattern at an incredible price. The Army Digital pattern looks really odd to me up close, but I was impressed by the way J's tripod legs looked when wrapped in it. I had only had the top section of two legs wrapped with the Mossy Oak pattern, and the remaining carbon-fiber leg sections were a bit shiny, so I covered those sections in the Army Digital pattern.

I went outside around 9:55 to photograph the birds. The Townsend's solitaire frequented a perch atop the pinon pine, and the nice blue sky made for a nice background. I also got some nice images of an Oregon junco. I really liked the non-slip grip provided by the Camo Form at the bottom of the tripod legs.

I went back inside around 11:20 and downloaded the images I took. Then I downselected the images I took yesterday in Capture One (C1) and processed some for a blog entry.

I had lunch around 12:30 of a Clif Bar (because we were out of ham), a banana, and an apple. I worked up a blog entry, then started to make dinner of my chili around 2:10. We left in the Jeep around 3:15.

We checked out the road that goes by the Rio Chama Recreation Area just downstream of Abiquiu Dam. I pulled into a parking spot by a picnic area by the river to look at some interesting ripples and reflections. They weren't quite interesting enough to photograph though. As I was backing up out of the parking area, I ran into a post made from a piece of wood the size of a railroad tie! Fortunately, I only broke the plastic housing of the driver's side tail light and put a permanent dimple in the end of the bumper. :( That's the first single-car accident I've ever been in, and I was disgusted! The road further downstream was really muddy, so we turned around.

We started to head to the white cliffs, but got sidetracked in the badlands. The badlands are known as the Plaza Blanca Badlands or The Sierra Negra Badlands. J spotted a balanced rock, and as we made our way over towards it, we discovered that there were in fact two balanced rocks very close to each other. We spent our whole time photographing them — and mostly waited for the sun to come back out from the clouds. The image to the left of one of the balanced rocks was created by processing one RAW file twice: once for the sky and once for the land. The RAW file contained all of the necessary information, but the sunlit sky was much brighter than the shaded land. The two processed files were combined in Photoshop.

We returned to the RV around 5:50 and discovered that our propane had run out. We knew we were getting low, and we had been planning to leave today until Napoleón told us about other places we wanted to go, including the white cliffs. The temperature was supposed to drop into the teens overnight, so we would need propane to keep our gray and black water tanks from freezing. We quickly prepped the RV to move and I stowed the solar-electric panels while J called Napoleón Suazo-Garcia Sr., who specializes in tourist information, to see where the best place was to get propane. We hooked up the Jeep to tow, and left at 6:38 — we were sad to leave.

We reached the Chevron in Chili at 7:07, and they had propane just like Napoleón said. :)

After getting the propane tank filled, we had dinner right there in the parking lot of my chili. Yes, we had chili in Chili. :) I had the last of the blueberry pie that J had baked for me for dessert. We left at 7:55.

We reached the WalMart in Española at 8:15 to spend the night, and we went in to do some shopping.

We returned to the RV around 9:15. I downloaded the images I took this afternoon, then downselected them in Capture One (C1) before going to bed.