Chasing Pinterest.

Give me a moment to express how much time I spend on Pinterest. It's a lot. A lot. My job leaves me a lot of free computer time, so I'm really well-acquainted with the photography that makes its way around the artsy corners of that website. This is my friend Dana, who has graced this blog with her image many times in the past, and she's the only one I know who truly understands and shares my love of the internet, particularly for pictures of nature and people out having adventures.

We went to another park, Harrington Beach State Park, the weekend after my excursion to Kohler Andrae with my parents. We had great weather for our purposes, because we were planning to do more hiking than lying on the beach. It rained on and off all day, and we both agreed that was perfect since the park was just as pretty under clouds and wasn't full of bustling tourists. The people who were there seemed to be like-minded, and we shared some quiet greetings as we passed each other on paths.

My Pinterest connection to these pictures, is that Dana and I always joke about the photos of girls who braid their hair together and face mysteriously away from the camera. Those are the kind of pictures that I love to make fun of, but I secretly think are just really pretty. So we recreated one in our hoodies in the rain. 

My two favorite places in this park are the quarry lake where most of these pictures were taken, and the scattered remnants of foundations and homes that pop up throughout the forest. I had another vague memory from my childhood of coming to this park and being entranced by these ghost houses. Now that I'm older I paid a bit more attention to the signs the parks put up about the history of these foundations. They belong to a mining community that stood in the area, the same one that initially mined from the quarry where this lake is now. I told Dana that these houses/businesses are my favorite kind of creepy, because I can't help picturing what they were like as new buildings, with their patrons hurrying in and out, full of life and noise. And now they're just stones covered in moss. I found a great blog post that talks more about this history of this area if you're interested.

I've always loved the creepy, lost feeling of abandoned places. Do you have any near where you live that you like to visit?