Hello Life, Plane tickets for me, why thank you very much!

Here are just a few postcards that I made from my trip to Chicago. I spent most of my time in my hometown of Lockport. I am planning a return trip within a year to finish my essay. It will actually take two more trips to finish that essay, so i'll cross my fingers and hope that I have a blessed 2009 year. Plus I need to spend the night on the streets of the Chi to get some of the shots that I wanted. This time around I was moving to fast I had a million things to do and thousands of places to be each day. The forests of Illinois provided me with plenty of stock landscape, flower and wildlife photos. I saw deers, cardinals, and night time fireflies. While on this trip I covered my family reunion and captured my goal of 2000 photos on the side. Visiting my hometown puts a motivation in me that is one of a kind. I love the small town, big heart ideals of the mid-west. Any place where your family roots run deep is a place where you can throw all worries aside. The food was great, the people were very welcoming and the weather was the only drawback to this trip. There happened to be a thunderstorm the first day I wanted to go to Chicago. Then the next day there was a tornado warning all through out Chicago and a small tornado dropped down and had winds that were powerful enough to alarm all residents, topple trees onto cars as well as powerlines snapped in half laid in the streets. So I didn't get to spend the night in Chicago for those night time shots as I had expected to do in my trip planner. Things still worked out for the best and I made it home in one piece. "From the Chi to Cal with the I"-Ryan "Bluetwig" Williams