Vacation = Photo Binge

Okay, so I might have gone a little overboard on the photography on this trip, y'all. How many did you take, Emily? Um... a few... How many? Oh all right... like, 160. *is shocked into silence*

So yeah, I took a lot of photos. But they're pretty! Wanna see?

These in the first batch were all taken at Baylor Academy in Chattanooga. We met with the choir there and performed with and for them. It's such a beautiful campus, with all these trees (young and old) and big brick buildings.

Here's a different and brighter shot of that same tree. I took these while we were out on the lawn for a fire drill. Funny story, that - remind me to tell you.

Holy muffins, they had REAL plates and REAL pizza and it was delicious. I was very impressed.

I think this is the computer science building, through a tree.

My choir director spotted me taking this photo of a bush and complimented me for taking such artistic shots.

Another iteration of my favorite winter image - a bare tree against a cloudy sky.

Because I'm weird, staircases fascinate me. They're always one of the first things I look at when I visit a university campus, and I really liked these.

Baylor abuts the Tennessee River, and they own the island you can see in the background there.

This is definitely the computer science building. It looks so tall and imposing - I love it.

So that was Friday (actually we also went to Hamilton Place Mall and a murder mystery dinner show, but I didn't take any pictures), so let's move on to Saturday. I'll probably put most of it in another post, but here's a little taste.

This is the view as we rode our giant tour bus up the mountain to Ruby Falls. I love how even the really big buildings look tiny when you're up that high.

Our view of the TN River on the way up was simply breathtaking.

Here are a couple of "down in the caves" pictures. Mostly you can't really tell what it's supposed to be (and more often that not it isn't supposed to be anything), but they're still pretty.

See, isn't the light kinda nice? This one almost puts me in mind of a giant bonfire or something, just with the way the light is shaped.

3 flags outside the caves - Tennessee, the United States, and Ruby Falls.

Under the flags was this lovely water feature, which the choir sat in front of to have our picture taken.

After touring the caves you can walk up several flights of stairs to this observation tower...

...where the view is something like this. It's pretty spectacular.

 Oh wait, another cave picture. This one is more my speed. I'm a macro girl, through and through.

My friends actually laughed at me for stopping to capture this. I responded, "Y'all, this fire hydrant is GORGEOUS!"

And of course, the falls. SO pretty. When you walk into the "room," it's all dark and there's quiet music playing.

Then, as the music reaches its most exciting moment, the lights are thrown on and the wonder of Ruby Falls is revealed.

You can even walk around behind the water (if you don't mind being splashed a little), where you can better see the mechanism used to create the color effects.

That ought to do it for this post, folks. When I've done my other stuff I'll post about Rock City and the aquarium.

Oh yeah, the fire drill story. See, at my school the fire alarms have a tendency to go off rather often. Often enough that they've now put in the official school literature that a real fire will be signaled by a bell AND an announcement. So when we were sitting around in Baylor's choir room and the fire alarm went off (which we later learned was because their director had just turned on the heat), we just sort of looked around, unconcerned. Finally somebody from Baylor was like, "Um... guys, I think we should evacuate." It just didn't occur to us that we should do anything until an announcement was made. That's fire safety at its finest. :D