We’ve been hit by a serious heat wave during the past few weeks, with very little rain and ridiculously high temperatures (not normal for Southern Transilvania, where summers used to be a balmy 25-27 degrees Celsius when I was a kid). So I started to think fondly of colder times and gladly contemplated freezing weather — anything to escape the heat.
The photos were taken in Grosvenor Park.
Back in 2006, when I got serious about photography, we went up to the roof of our apartment building and were rewarded with a beautiful evening sky and sunset. You know how it is, you always remember the first time, it seems more magical somehow, and this time it was no different. The sky and the sun looked gorgeous.
We lived in Grosvenor Park (North Bethesda, Maryland) for five years. It was a nice community, located right next to the Beltway and the Metro. Here’s what it looked like from above.
If you want to see what it looked like from ground level, you can browse photos I took there in my photo stream at Flickr or my galleries at Google Photo.
Some of the most striking fall foliage in the DC area can be found at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Bethesda, MD. It’s not majestic, like the kind you find in certain spots of Rock Creek Park, or sweeping, like the kind you see in Shenandoah National Park, but it is striking, and I’ll let the photos explain the term for me.
Do you now see what I mean? Good. Let me just add that you can have a wonderful time walking around their grounds on a Saturday afternoon, especially with your loved one by your side.
Go ahead, click on the thumbnails! You’ll get a full-screen lightbox-view of each photograph, and you can scroll in-between them. It’s pretty cool!
If you should drive into the Maryland countryside, along River Road, the Potomac River and the C&O Canal, past farms and mansions, you’ll find a lone building made of red sandstone, standing in a meadow. This sign will be next to it.
The building is the one-room Seneca Schoolhouse, the only school in the area during the later part of the 19th century, after the Civil War. The schoolhouse was established by a local farmer and miller by the name of Upton Darby, who generously provided the land, stone and wood for the building. Local families contributed money or skills for its construction.
I love the cozy little building. It’s wonderful architecture. I love the door knob especially, though I doubt it’s the original one, as it says “City of New York” on it…
There’s more information at the schoolhouse museum’s website, including visiting and contact info. When we stopped to see it, the light may have been perfect but nobody was around to show us inside, so all we could do was to walk around.
Raoul Pop 