Writing Retreat 2018: Sunday

This week is my writ­ing retreat at Minnedosa. I’ve set myself a goal of 2,500 words a day, split between a morn­ing and an evening writ­ing sprint. I’m also tak­ing advan­tage of the clear(ish) skies to do some astrophotography.

On Sun­day, I arrived in the ear­ly after­noon. I went for a vis­it with my land­lords (whose cab­in I’m bor­row­ing for the week), then set­tled in at the cab­in. In the evening I did my 1,250 words, then hit the road. There’s an old, aban­doned house that I got a geo­t­agged pho­to of last year, and I want­ed to see if I could find it. I thought it’d be a great loca­tion for some night pho­tos: the Milky Way, per­haps, or some star trails. 

(The moon is clos­ing in on full right now, and it tends to wash out the fainter stars, so if I want Milky Way, I have to wait till after moon­set. That’s… dif­fi­cult, since it sets some­where around 3 or 4 AM these days. (More on that in Mon­day’s post.))

I want­ed to find the old house while it was still light, so I left the cab­in around 9 PM and drove the half-hour north, up a high­way that went from pave­ment to grav­el about ⅓ of my way to my des­ti­na­tion. (There was anoth­er route, pos­si­bly a lit­tle longer, but I knew it’d be paved the whole way. I decid­ed I’d take it when I returned, after dark.)

I found the house, and then, since the sun was just bare­ly set­ting, went for a tour. I drove down to Neep­awa, stop­ping at the side of the road when I saw a par­tic­u­lar­ly spec­tac­u­lar cloud lit by the sun­set (above). From there I drove back to the cab­in, where I watched a cou­ple episodes of Car­nivàle, wait­ing for full dark.

Just around mid­night I set out again. I found the house in the dark, and snapped a few pho­tos. I’m plan­ning to head back for more anoth­er night.

And then I went back to my home for the week, and crawled into bed around 2 AM.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.