Lancaster County, PA (Road Trip Day 1)

by Lauren

The time is finally here - we're on our road trip! We left on Wednesday morning and headed for our first stop in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We had hoped to interview an Amish person, but discovered that being filmed is against their beliefs, so instead we interviewed the owner of Good 'n Plenty, a fantastic restaurant in Lancaster.

First, though, we headed over to Intercourse, PA (what a name, right?) where we took in some of the local culture. The land out there was so different from what we're used to at home. There were farms everywhere and Amish people riding in horse-drawn buggies.

We stopped at one little village where we got our picture taken with a couple of big horses:

This one even smiled for the camera:

After roaming around for a little bit, we went to Good 'n Plenty, which is owned by Sarah's friend Jenn's grandparents. Good 'n Plenty is such a fantastic restaurant and Jenn's grandparents are so sweet. Right when we arrived, Jenn's grandmother served us a huge meal of mashed potatoes, fried chicken, pork & sauerkraut, homemade vanilla ice cream, and shoo fly pie:

After filling ourselves with as much food as we could handle, we interviewed Jenn's grandfather about his restaurant. He had lots of great advice for young people, but I don't want to spoil the interview so I won't say anything more.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Lancaster County, where we saw lots of adorable farm animals and beautiful landscapes:

As we were driving around trying to figure out what to do next, we stumbled upon an abandoned corn maze with little tricycles and of course we had to get out to play. I love this picture of Sarah rounding a corner on her tricycle in front of a field that says "FIELD":

Some other random shots I really liked:

Finally, we put the corn fields of Lancaster behind us and headed on towards Ohio:

If you want to see all of my photos from Day 1, check out my slideshow here:


Sarah and Nicole took a lot of fantastic pictures too that they'll hopefully be uploading soon!

Anyway, right now we're in Odessa, Missouri and we have lots more to blog about but it's getting late, so that will have to wait for tomorrow. Keep checking back for more!

Photography - My Passion

by Lauren

Before I begin I just wanted to show off Nicole's new banner for our blog! Isn't she a fantastic artist?

Anyway, last night the three of us had a conference call with Kristin, our RTN mentor, and we learned all about how to use our video camera. It's much bigger and more professional-looking than any video camera I have ever touched, so I'm a little scared of it, but also so excited to be a videographer. Photography has been a passion of mine for many years now, and while I tend to work with still images, not video, I think this will be an excellent opportunity to use what I know, learn something new, and broaden my horizons on visual imagery (ok, I admit I reworded that sentence 2 or 3 times to make it sound smart).

Basically, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can't wait to make this documentary. Last night, I could hardly fall asleep because I was lying in bed thinking of all the cool shots we could get on our trip. The last time I video-taped a trip was when I went tornado chasing, but then I wasn't paying much attention to style and composition, mostly just to running around in the wind trying not to get blown over.

Speaking of photography, one of our interviews is with Chris Johns, the editor-in-chief of National Geographic! The magazine sent us his photo book, Wild at Heart, as well as a few magazines that he has contributed to. My dream job would be to do exactly what he has done. I spend almost every day walking around with a huge camera around my neck (so yes, I look like a tourist everywhere I go) because I'm always afraid that I'm going to miss something... and I would! I think I take anywhere between 30 and 500 pictures in a day (more if I'm on vacation) because everywhere I turn there's something new I want to capture forever.

One recent example of my inability to put my camera away was on a vacation I took to Mexico with my (very indulgent) boyfriend and some friends. While our friends were lounging at the beach sipping margaritas, I insisted that we (my boyfriend and I) venture deep into the jungle surrounding the Cobá ruins because I wanted to photograph some of the archaeology sites (places where new ruins are still being excavated). We ended up getting stalked three miles into the jungle by a crazy Mayan man with a whip who I think wanted to kill us.... Instead of killing us, though, he got his picture taken as we made our narrow escape. If that's not dedication to my passion for photography, I don't know what is!

Anyway, one thing that has always been important to me in all the travel photography I've done is that I like my pictures to tell a story. I think that's a lot of what we're going to be doing on this trip. Not only are we interviewing people about their stories, but we're telling our own story along the way.

I hope that for those of you following our blog before we leave, you're getting an idea of who we are and what we're hoping to accomplish on our upcoming trip. And on that note... only two weeks left to wait!