Last weekend I paid a visit to Richmond, Kentucky for my brothers' birthdays (they're ten days apart so we usually just have a single shindig for them) and while I was down there I managed to squeeze in a short visit to Lake Reba. While I have nothing good to say about the city of Richmond, I do make an exception for Lake Reba.
Lake Reba is located at the edge of Richmond, you can almost pretend to be somewhere out in the backcountry if you can ignore the golf course and sports fields along parts of it. My family likes to talk and so we didn't make it to the lake until later in the day and barely had an hour of daylight to wander and take photos.
While the setting sun limited our time for taking photos it also made for some fun photo opportunities. So did the ducks that seemed to have taken up residence at the lake. We'd went wandering in part to see what sorts of spring surprises we could find and Mother Nature didn't disappoint.
We were more thinking along the lines of budding and blooming things but the ducks had a surprise for us. When we walked out on the boat ramp (boating and fishing are allowed in Lake Reba) to get shots of the lake I spotted the nest of eggs along the side of it.
There were plenty of blooming things too, and some surprises that were human created. Those were mostly of the WTF? variety however...
This sign and the next one raise so many questions. What happened to cause these to be put up in the first place? Who thinks a metal roofed structure half surrounded by water is a good place to be when lightning is flickering about? Why was it necessary to make handwritten additions to the sign above?
People never cease to amaze (disappoint?) me, whether it's trampling on delicate biomes in the desert or the alpine tundra or trashing a lovely landscape with litter, there's always someone making sure we can't have nice things. There was what appeared to be a birthday party at one of those unsafe shelters, I suspect it or an earlier one was the likely source of these leftovers.
Don't get me wrong, the whole place wasn't trashed, there was plenty of loveliness to shoot, I just happened to see that right in front of me as I was lining up another shot.
Everybody seemed to be at the playground or the birthday party, the lake was nice and quiet and peaceful. One could easily forget that they're still in a city or that there are tons of World War II chemical weapons stored just a mile or two away (not too far behind the trees in the background is Bluegrass Army Depot where they keep and are working on burning a bunch of nasty stuff like VX and tabun).
If you ever have the misfortune to be in Richmond and need to kill a bit of time, give Lake Reba a visit! Now for me to make like the ducks in this next photo and swim on out of here!
