While I was out in Pennsylvania, I went down to Dulles in Virginia to the Stephen Udvar-Hazy Center which is an Annex of the Smithsonian's Air & Apace Museum. It's quite the cool place if you like all things flight related. This is one of the last pics I took there while waiting for others in my party to meet up with me. This is the SR-71 Blackbird, a very cool plane which is still the fastest plane in the world, and the space shuttle Discovery can be seen behind.
TGIF! It's Friday and Friday's Are Bokehlicious! Today's image with some lovely bokeh is of a butterfly I was quite delighted to see as I have not seen one for a while. This is a Great Spangled Fritillary on one of my Zinnias. The Zinnia is a new color for this year and reminds me of a peppermint candy. I captured this image this past Saturday.
When I am in Minnesota, I usually get to observe and captured Redwing Blackbirds. This year was a good one for females. I captured this one in the reeds on the edge of a pond near where we were camping.
It's Wildflower Wednesday! I posted a butterfly on one of these recently. These are a group of my Teasels in bloom. They have a lot of character in my opinion, very interesting flower heads. They always seem to attract bees and butterflies. They spread a lot so if you plant, be sure not in an area where you don't want that. I see quite a lot of them growing by road sides.
I am so happy, I saw my first Monarch catarpillars on my milkweed! I had rescued this Milkweed from some road construction by my house several years ago now and each year it has continued to thrive and produce more plants. I saw this little guy on one of the leaves a few evenings ago. He was pretty small so must have been fairly newly hatched. There was another larger one on another plant. Yay. Hope they both survive and do well.
While I was out in Pennsylvania and at Hershey Gardens I saw this very cool flower. They had a neat "Children's Area" which was not just for kids. It had a lot of flowers that butterflies and bees love. I found this flower very cool looking and it was attracting bees while I was there. It is called a "Globe Thistle" and I looked it up and it should grow well in my area of the country as well. I am going to look for these or seeds for them next spring.
Happy Steamy Sunday! Today's image is from Paradise Pennsylvania which is the town east of Strasburg that their trains travel back and forth to. I captured Norfolk & Western 475 while it was heading back to it's train to pull it back to Strasburg. On the trip out, the locomotive is on the end of the train pulling it backwards because there is no way to get it turned around easily. It uncouples and goes around the train on a side track and then backs on to re-couple and head out for the return. 475 was the locomotive that was running with 611 last year when I saw it as well.
