Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2005 was a year of assignments throughout the Midwest for me. I like to take driving trips when it makes sense. I enjoy driving and like to be able to arrive at a place gradually, to know what is between here and there, and to have some sense of distance. When you fly, you get dropped into a new place with no bearings. You don’t have a sense of scale for how far you’ve traveled. You don’t know how the landscape unraveled between here and there. And, for me at least, it’s more difficult to get a feel for directions. If I drove in from the east, then I arrive knowing east from west, north from south. When arriving by air, I need to depend more on maps and make a conscious effort to pay attention to sun angles, etc. Obviously, flying is often necessary, either for speed, efficiency, or to just plain get somewhere that you can’t drive to.

The first two shots in this post are from a prairie burn and related festival that I shot in the spring of 2005. I live near some of the largest remaining sections of tallgrass prairie in North America. Ranchers who graze cattle on this land have learned that a controlled burn in the spring will help new grass grow that will better fatten their livestock. These burns are often done at night while winds are low and it’s an amazing experience when driving across the prairie to see lines of fire in the distance and smell the sweet scent of burning grass.

Other assignments required far more driving than this one did. 2005 seems to have been the Year of the Roundup. In magazine-speak, a roundup is a story that bundles several locations together by theme. You’ve seen them: Best Places to See Fall Color in the Great Lakes, Children’s Museums of the Midwest, Ten Places You Can Still Find a Real Soda Fountain. That sort of thing. For several years we would shoot an annual story on the Best Christmas Shopping in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis and Des Moines.

These are difficult trips to make work financially. A roundup may not pay more than a story on a single destination but, if the publication doesn’t pay expenses, you can see where the costs would add up when you need to visit several cities over several days. I’ve always tried to combine as many assignments or stock opportunities into each trip as possible. I’ll let art directors I work with often know where I’m going to be to see if they have something else in the area that I can tag on or I’ll look for iconic or unusual scenes in the area that I can use in my stock files. It works but it requires a lot of planning and a lot of driving.

I’m located about as close to the center of the US as you can get but in 2004 and 2005 I drove to both coasts in addition to several trips to the Great Lakes region and various other places around the Midwest and Western US. In 2004, we drove to Portland, Maine for an MTWA meeting, took the ferry to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, drove up across the Gaspe to the St. Lawrence and then back home through Quebec, Montreal and Toronto.

In 2005 we drove to the west coast for a different reason. We had decided to take a serious look at relocating. We’d lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and had outgrown it when we both began working from home in the late 90s. In 2003 we leased office space downtown to have some more room. It worked for awhile but we realized we were more efficient when we had a home office. We decided to look for some place large enough to accommodate our home and office and we decided that, if we were moving, maybe we should make a big move.

We made a list of things we would want from a new home and a cool, but not cold climate was high on the list. From our travels, we decided that the Pacific Northwest was our best option. We researched towns and put together a driving circuit that would take us through several places that we thought had great potential, mostly along the Oregon and Washington coasts. We threw in some towns in Wyoming and Idaho for the trips out and back as well. The panorama above was taken near our first stop: Laramie, Wyoming.

Port Angeles, Washington, was high on our list based on the experiences we’d had there on a previous trip in 1997. What we learned by our second visit to this town — and actually from this entire experiment — was that you need to look at a town completely differently if you are planning on visiting as a tourist or moving there permanently. The things we loved about Port Angeles were quickly overshadowed by things that now seemed unworkable for us in terms of a home. In general, all of the places we looked at had much higher property values than what we currently had in Kansas (this was before the real estate bubble burst but we could see that coming and didn’t want to get caught up in it). We liked the smaller coastal towns but were concerned about being further from international airports and having mountain roads between us and larger cities.

In the end, we decided to move just 30 miles east of our old home to Lawrence, Kansas. It’s a university town so it has a lot of diversity and a vibrant arts community. It’s 30 minutes closer to our international airport in Kansas City. And it’s incredibly affordable compared to the west coast. You can get a 3000 sq. ft. house here for what a double-wide might cost you on the west coast. It has worked out great for us and we’re very happy with our choice.