A horse of a different color

Ever notice how various towns "adopt" an animal to represent it?  Traveling from town to town, we've seen a whole variety of these adopted animals, painted in all sorts of different motifs.  I'm not sure who was the first to come up with the idea of "painting an animal for  special purposes", but it's sure popular!  Typically, a company, organization or even the local military base will sponsor these, paying the artist or contributing to a fund-raiser.

It's been fun to see the various animals that the towns come up with.  Horses seem to be the most common, with bison falling closely behind.   Some of the towns just have the animals in basic color (copper, or just painted black & white).  Some of the towns, tho, really go all out - or perhaps some towns just have better artists involved.   A few towns adopt a "symbol" of something to represent them, like the caskets of New Orleans.

When a town goes "all out", I love seeking out the statues, and taking pictures of course.  We are currently in Ogden Utah, and I can say that this town had the most participation than any I've seen thus far.  They chose the "horse" as their symbol and have 80 of them in their downtown area.  They are up and down all the streets, some with their heads down, some (most) standing, looking forward and few reared up on their back legs.  All beautifully done, all very different from each other.  Quite a show.  Theirs were done to celebrate the town's 75th anniversary of Ogden's Pioneer Days. 

Here are some pictures of Ogden's horses, along with a sample of some of the other "special art" we've found...

  Ogden Pioneer Days 75th Celebration Horses

 Antelope Island, Utah

 Custer, South Dakota

 Jacksonville Florida

 Lexington, Kentucky

 Pensacola, Florida

Georgetown, Kentucky

 Vero Beach, Florida

 Salt Lake, Utah

 Colorado

 Bennington, New Hampshire

                                                                                    New Orleans, Louisiana

 Winchester, Virginia

 Berea, Kentucky

 Hollywood, California

 Memphis, Tennessee

 New Orleans, Louisiana

I'm sure there are a lot more out there...I'll just keep on looking!

...on the road in Utah,  Marie

New Orleans! Part 1 Continued: Images...

Out and about in NOLA! (That's the acronym they use for New Orleans LA, it's printed on just about everything!) The French Quarter is a photographer's dream. If you like people shots, there is every kind from cute to crazy. If you like architecture, they have the gambit from the very very old to the new, from falling down to the refurbished and all the color & decoration you can imagine! If you like art, they have it everywhere, on the streets, along sidewalks, next to buildings, under, over & on top of just about anything they can find to attach it to! If you like landscape & flowers, they tuck plants and flowers where ever they can...and the magnolia trees are just about everywhere, and were starting to bloom! See? A paradise, so you can imagine how I felt, carrying my wonderful new red camera around, snapping away. It took us forever to get from one block to the next as I would yell to Jack to "stop! Just look at that door!" (or "balcony" or "building" or...you get the idea).

It looked as if they had a couple of "themes" going as well, but couldn't quite get them going. One was small painted coffins (I thought that was a bit weird myself, but I guess they thought they would play up their reputation, and it's a "bigger canvas") of which we only saw a couple. The other were these funny looking dogs, again, we only saw a couple. "Sponsor" info or "message" info wasn't prevalent, so hard to say what either of them were all about...but of course, I took pictures of them!

Here's a sampling...if you want to indulge, there's lots & lots more on my Flickr account!













































































































...kicking back in Louisiana, Marie

One last stop, then off we go!

Our last day in Phoenix, just a little more time to "see what we can see", so we decided to go to Scottsdale.

Now the last time I had been to Scottsdale, I was about 15, and it was a small "cowboy town" that you could still tie your horses up to. Now I know things change, and places grow, but oh my goodness!! What did they do to Scottsdale? They took it away and put a high-end western version of La Jolla in it's place! They didn't even leave the horse rails! ;-) Pretty things to see, lots of nice public art displayed, even an old adobe mission...




















































As we bid a fond farewell to Phoenix, to our friends (for now) it left us with another one of it's beautiful sunsets as we head to Huachuca City AZ for a few days to enjoy their great sites...















If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can on my Flickr account at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/

...on the road in Arizona, Marie