I didn’t want to post this at the time, since, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but think about the guy who tweeted every step of his vacation and came home to find that the burglars found that information quite helpful. But now I’m back, robbers, so don’t get any ideas.

We rented a house right on the water, a salt water river on the Cape.

We were able to put our kayaks in and go. If you’re like me and most of your exercise comes from typing all day long, it turns out that kayaking, especially against the current, is a pretty good upper-body workout.

The beach behind the house was overrun with Fiddler crabs, an unnatural species of quarter-sized crabs where the females have two little claws, and the males have a normal claw and then a giant claw. They flee when humans come near them, though, so they weren’t much of a bother, just a perpetual curiosity.

The owners were apparently dog lovers; none were in the rental home, obviously, but a bronze (?) black lab stood watch over the water, which gave lots of great photo opportunities.

Some gnarled pine trees provided some great photo opportunities, too.

Hammocks are cool, as is the Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Seems they make a great combination!

For reasons I couldn’t even begin to explain, I spent a while photographing weeds amongst wildflowers and asking the experts on Flickr to identify them. I see the above plant everywhere; it was identified as goldenrod that hasn’t flowered yet. And as Wikipedia points out, goldenrod is not an allergen, even though it looks like it would be miserable.

Blue Herons (and, not photographed at all, ospreys) make me wish I had a longer lens, though. But it turns out that most 400mm+ lenses are in the $1,000 price range.

(This blog post was pretty hacked together. But the main page was about to be blank.)