Blue Ridge Parkway

July 27, 2009
I realized today that I started this blog at a really bad time in my travels. Blue Ridge Parkway is the largest/longest park we have to collect so there will be a lot of blog entries from this park. I am trying to post things that happen each day but I hope that since I'll be at this park for some time you all don't loose interest.

Nothing major happened today as far as work goes. We were able to work today despite rain in the area but we had to stop around 3:00 due to wet roads. That was OK because we still had an hour drive back to the hotel and some work to do when we got to the hotel. There was no sulfur smell in the truck today so that was also a plus.

I've seen several animals along the parkway. This place has a ton of black butterflies/moths with blue tails. I haven't been quick enough to get a photo of a living one yet but they are everywhere. There are also woodchucks everywhere. No luck on getting a photo of one of them either. There was a near miss yesterday where one almost got squashed by our truck, luckily it was able to escape. The usual deer are around. I saw a dead turkey vulture on the road yesterday. It was weird because turkey vultures are not usually seen on the ground, or on/near a road. It must have been eating something before it's life was ended but I still can't imagine that a car didn't scare it away...weird. Today we saw a black rat snake in the middle of the road. Both Jeff and I would have put money on it being dead. I felt bad because I didn't want it to continually be run over even if it was dead. We went around a loop and when we got back it was gone! We were both shocked! The snake really looked dead but I guess it wasn't...good for it! I was able to get a photo of another black rat snake we saw later in the day. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough with the camera to snap a photo when the snake was on the side of the road so the grass photo is all I got.

I tried the panoramic option on my camera today for the first time. The photo turned out pretty good. The photo shows the clouds building in the area.