I can't explain it. Myself, @dandays - The Luckiest Guy I Know, is at a loss for words. I don't know wtf happened.
A few days ago or last week, last weekend, whenever it was, we went for a drive toward a city called Townsend here in Tennessee, it's real pretty over there. We ended up on Cades Cove Loop, an 11 mile scenic drive that winds in and around The Smoky Mountains. It loops around a huge (11 miles worth) valley. Imagine a lake in the middle of tree covered mountains with a curvy road wrapping around it. The valley is like that except with grass instead of water—the other side of the road is dense forest.
I was going through my photos trying to choose a cover image and decided I'll go with the burning one for this article. We'd parked the car on the opposite side of a controlled burn for this photo, nothing was on fire that wasn't supposed to be.
Images - phone
We noticed there's a trail in front of the car leading way off in the distance. Figured it had to go somewhere so I looked across the valley and saw a roof top in the middle of the forest. The valley is all private protected land, there isn't any houses around but I see a structure.
We went over there. It's a nearly 200 year old homestead that's well maintained by Smoky Mountain National Park service. I didn't know how old or what it was until I looked it up. There was an updated wooden sign driven into the ground: Oliver's Cabin.
The Oliver's settled there in 1826 and have owned that property with the home on it long before the loop toured through until eventually becoming a National Park. The one seen in the distance is a smaller home on the property the Oliver's built for their son. The main house sets behind it. On the property is a few well preserved shed-type structures. Other than that, it's nature, you're in the middle of a forest.
When I take pictures specifically for an article in mind like this homestead, I'm doing a lot of mapping out how I'll write it, too, while clicking photos. So when I click the picture, I always check it out because they have a sequence. Snap it, look at it, repeat. Try not to get my shadow in them—that's one. Make sure it's clear, whatever else, but I always look at it. If I need to delete it, I do, take another one, repeat steps.
We walked up to the house, the smaller one, got a shot of it, walked through it and out the back doorway to the main house. Walked through that one too. Followed the trail leading out the back—it didn't go far. Turned around, got a shot of the property from the back and even put a @coloneljethro touch on it—black n white filter.
What makes this weird is I looked at those pictures as I was taking them. Then we probably looked at them again inside the car cuz it was way too freezing to stay out there any longer. Nothing was out of the ordinary, one of us would've noticed something obviously out of place, we didn't miss it.
So when I went through my photos today looking for a cover image for the Cades Cove article, I noticed two big, unmistakably obvious, red frames in my photo gallery and wrote this one instead. This is what it looked like today, the same gallery I've been looking at for however long now. Anyone? Can anyone tell me what in the real fuck those red things are?
Notice the sequence? They're right after the stairs. Inside the main room of the front house was a staircase leading up to a second floor—I went up there. Pura didn't want to cuz they looked freaky, she said, so I went up by myself and snapped a few shots right quick before coming back down. Then we walked to the main house and so on—everything you just saw.
When I went up those stairs, I snapped a shot of the gate at the top of the stairs and one of the floor at eye level. I opened the gate and stepped into the room before snapping the first shot—lengthwise photo looking back at the stairs. The second shot was from the side of the room opposite the stairs, looking through the wooden window frame out at the property. That's it. Came down, checked out the rest of the property and went back to the car.
I don't know wtf happened. I have no idea why those last two images look like NoNames designs now, however many days after the fact.
I was wearing a blue sweater that day and a black vest. I didn't have on anything red and I didn't take a backward picture or snap a picture of my pocket or anything weird like that. Blue as in blue, sky blue, and black as in black, not red or blue.
