This morning I woke up early at 5:00 AM and looked
outside. It was raining so hard that I
didn’t think I would ever see the sun again.
I crawled back into bed with the laptop and did some more editing of the
photos from yesterday. It’s now night-time
and I still haven’t finished them and now have another 900 pics to edit.
By the time I went for breakfast it was still raining
lightly and I had no opportunity to research what I was going to do today. I figured though, that with the rain, it
would need to be an indoor activity. I
was already thinking of going to the aquarium and I was able to use cellular
data to find an address and call Uber.
When we started out it was still raining enough to use
wipers, but by the time we got to the aquarium, not only had it stopped raining,
but the sun was shining. I was wandering
through the aquarium and taking videos with my iPhone and had not even taken
out a camera or lens yet. I got all the
way through and went outside. I got more
photos with the iPhone and got a random stranger to take my photo in front of
The Pacific Ocean.
Afterwards, I decided I should probably take some shots with
the Nikon, so I opened the backpack and pulled out the “big” camera, which
immediately provoked a conversation. It
ended up with a couple more followers on Instagram. Those cards come in handy. When I went inside, I ran into another
photographer and we got chatting about gear.
She’s using Canon and me Nikon. But
even that resulted in another follower on Instagram.
I went completely through the aquarium again and ended up
taking 900 shots. Once done with that, I
stopped and had lunch at their café before calling an Uber to take me back to
the hotel. It was then that I discovered
that I had forgotten to change the shutter speed and all the shots were under-exposed
and mostly black frames.
This is going to result in a lot more work in editing, to
recover at least some of the shots. I
had some good ones too, I think. We’ll
see what happens. I’ve done it before
where I have rescued a prize-winning photo from a near black frame. This is all as a result of shooting RAW or in
Nikon’s case NEF. Recovering a JPG file
in this condition would be impossible.
The hotel internet finally came back on, so I tried to catch
up on email, bills etc. It only lasted
about 45 minutes before dropping out yet again.
By now it was getting to dinner time and I really have a craving for BBQ
Ribs. Last night I had asked for ribs at
the hotel, but the owner of the restaurant said that they don’t do ribs. However, he recommended I try Abbey’s Real
Texas BBQ. He said they have the best
BBQ ribs in the city.
So, I called another Uber and the restaurant is only about 4
miles away as the crow flies, but with all the freeways, it was really a big
circle route to get there. Once I got
inside, It’s a quaint place with a bunch of young people behind the
counter. It turns out that the
restaurant has been in operation for 37 years and all family owned, and all the
employees are family members. The
current ones are the Grandchildren of the original owners who brought it from
Texas.
I ordered the full rack of ribs, thinking they would be the
small pork ribs like at home. I was
wrong though. These ribs are huge. They are almost the size of beef ribs but are
pork. They came with two buns, spicy
fries and coleslaw. Plus, complimentary
chips and salsa to snack on while waiting for the order. I even had root beer instead of water for a
change, and it turned out to be bottomless.
After dinner, I called another Uber and headed back to the
hotel. Once in the room I discovered
that the internet was still down. So, I
started to write this out. Within about
45 minutes, the signal came back on, but who knows for how long. It’s a bit frustrating. So far this is pretty much the only negative
to the trip so far, well, ok, the rain isn’t great either.
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