Kristine Neeley » My Adventures

A Girls’ Trip :: Tybee & Savannah Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:00:28 +0000

Four friends, an eight hour drive, and a cottage home just steps from the beach.

Great food, carefree days (minus a few nasty jellyfish stings), and time to just be.

A perfect trip with lovely friends to one of the most pristine coastal settings in the South.

Let’s do it again, ladies!

Workanniversababymoon :: Charleston Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:00:41 +0000

When’s your next wedding? Next weekend in Charleston!
What are you doing for your anniversary? Going to Charleston.
Have you thought about doing a babymoon? We’re headed to Charleston!

Thus, entered my silly name for our trip this past weekend… the workanniversababymoon.

In a way, we figured we’d knock out a couple of momentous things at once. Though, while away, we decided that truly, we’d like to spend the next three and a half months or so living an everyday Babymoon – so Charleston only counts for that a little. I loved the juxtaposition of so many occasions this weekend, as it gave me time to look at Cliff and just appreciate him for every facet of who he is in my life. From my all-time favorite and best photography assistant – who plies me with water and lugs around my gear. To my very best friend and precious husband – who has given me the best four years of my life. To the father of our little girl – who, as timing would have it, let Dadda feel her from the outside for the first time as we were departing from Nashville.

Babe, this and every weekend with you, every trip, every day at home – it’s all a part of one huge adventure I’m so grateful to be sharing with you. Thank you for being exactly who you are; I wouldn’t change anything about you and love you immeasurably.

It was a weekend gone by entirely too fast, as of course our first day and a half in town were all about Ben & Maria’s big day – which still gave us a chance to soak in a couple of iconic marshland sunsets, some delicious lowcountry boil, and a quick visit downtown for a few pre-ceremony and ceremony festivities. But on Saturday is when vacation-mode kicked in and we had quite the itinerary: Saturday – beachtime at Sullivan’s Island, a ferry ride visit to Fort Sumter, a tour of the USS Yorktown, and dinner at Virginia’s on King (where I mistakenly did not bring my camera to document the MOST DELICIOUS SHE CRAB SOUP TO EVER TOUCH MY LIPS) and Sunday – a carriage ride tour of downtown, a walk through the city market and King Street, brunch at Hominy Grill (that place is popular for a reason, y’all), a visit to check out the H. L. Hunley which may have been one of the coolest history-related things I’ve ever seen, and a quick stop at the Angel Oak Tree before our departure home.

All in all, a great first visit to such a beautifully quintessential coastal city in the South – full of great food, hospitality, and breathtaking scenery everywhere you look. You can bet it won’t be our last visit!

Roots :: New Hampshire Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:54:12 +0000

In going, I did not know what to expect. It had been years. Many, many since I had been to the area. Many since I had seen my family. And just enough to approach the journey with as much hesitation as anticipation. It is hard going back in circumstances one wishes were not so. But they always say, nothing brings family together like weddings and funerals. In this case, we were making a final farewell.

Indeed, the farewell itself was months after Grammie’s passing on the first of February, but given the circumstances of a New England burial in winter, there was a necessary wait. That wait took us into June when Cliff and I, my mom, and my siblings could make the trip up to the New Hampshire highlands to join Grandpa, my dear Great Aunt AnnaLeigh and Uncle Mathew, and a few other extended family members for a small memorial. And while that was but a moment of the trip, standing graveside with her urn, an arrangement of beautiful roses, and emotions overflowing – it was everything the trip was about. Roots. And if there is anyone who understood roots, it was Grammie.

My grandparents both grew up in northern New Hampshire. Even my mom spent a few of her younger years there, which is saying a lot for a military family that made its way from coast to coast with a few stops in between. My whole life, my grandparents have been in Maryland where my mom was settled at the time of my introduction into the world. But I have memories of trips up north to visit that side of the family, just a few, but enough to know it’s where we’re from. My maternal side of the tree finds it’s roots in New Hampshire – my paternal, in New York. And it’s true, while I’ve spent my whole life below the Mason-Dixon Line – you can’t take the Yankee out of my bloodline.

So I relished our time there, soaking in the dialect and the scenery – visiting homes my grandparents grew up in, long-since owned by other families. It was enlightening and important – I’m grateful to have had the chance to go, though I’d trade the reason for going a million times over. Through it all, however, I couldn’t imagine Grammie wanting any part of it any differently. She went home.

Crater Lake :: Oregon Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:18:28 +0000

We knew what we were walking into – or rather, driving into – when it came to our visit to Crater Lake. 116″ snow drifts, little to no traffic, and an out-of-the-way destination. Just the formula for what feels like an escape to your own alpine haven. Winter in June, and it was just sublime. Seeing as there was less to explore (without your own set of snowshoes), it gave us a chance to slow down even more – to breathe in the cool, moisture rich air, and take in the sights fully. I can’t tell you how many hours the two of us spent in our own personal cubbies we were delighted to find in our room at the lodge: our two-window-wide upholstered seats overlooking the lake itself in all its snowy glory. We read and journaled, let the quiet wash over, and marveled at the vast stillness before us. (Took in a delicious dinner, sunrise, and breakfast too, I might add). The stillness, which I must say, played the setting for the most magnificent sunrise I have ever seen in all my life – caught entirely by accident (one perk to sleeping with the shades open and waking constantly through the night to use the restroom) and documented through my cubby window.

This is the last post from a series documenting our trip to the Northwest just a few weeks ago (though we ended with Lassen, the rain made documenting near impossible). See posts from Yosemite and Redwood, for more!

Redwood :: California Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:00:39 +0000

As much as I loved Yosemite, Redwood was… even lovelier. There, I said it.

Maybe, had my heart and mind not needed such a lightening as only the coast is apt to provide me, it would have not had the advantage. But in the end, it did. And even now, as I sit here poring over these photos reliving in my mind a place I was just only a week or so ago, I know it is true. There is something so rich and wonderful about the coast in the Pacific Northwest – that magical blend of rocky shores, seastacks, enchantingly green trees, and more sealife than one could shake a stick at. Put me on any beach and I’m happy. Put me on a beach in Washington, Oregon, or Northern California and I’m in some altered state of being where lying on a giant rock in a sea of sand, looking up at a grey-blue sky, listening to the loud, crashing waves, is the closest I’ve felt to bliss – true bliss – in awhile. Something about those places gets me talking to God, steadying myself, and marveling at Creation in a way that seems almost a necessity to my functioning. Even when I’m so tired from running at pace unknown, recently, to my pregnant-self and hungry and everything in between, I can’t help but be at rest there.

Add to all of that the true magic of Redwood – full to the brim of that the feeling one gets when standing at the foot of trees taller than the Empire State Building. Trees, made from a seed no bigger than an olive, growing to those heights over centuries. Yes, centuries. It was prehistoric and awe-inducing. The immensity of strength and perseverance, and whether it was walking through them or sleeping underneath them, you get used to their company – even in just a few short days. Even when breaking from their all-around-you embrace by standing on the coast, their surviving presence looms not too far in the distance.

From glorious start to a too-early finish, our time in Redwood was perfection. A surprising and delightful discovery for both Cliff and I, which he – admittedly – deserves all the credit for dropping it into our itinerary. It is a place not easily reached and out of the way, but the reward made every mile to get there more than worth it.

Yosemite :: California Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:00:56 +0000

“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where.
Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars.
This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”
- John Muir

It occurred to me, as this trip drew nearer, that what I was most looking forward to – mostly out of the familiarity of trips past – was the length of days. The seemingly endless length which makes the rising of the sun not a nuisance but a head-start. The coming of night not a call to sleep, but to linger, night by rainy or perfectly clear night, around the fire. We always linger until it seems nearly impossible that it is time to recharge from the day’s bountiful exhaustion. And yet, this exhaustion is more a filling than depletion – no matter which way you look at it.

Everything about Yosemite National Park is magnificent. I could do it no more justice than that with my words, and far less with my photos. Thank goodness there are people like Ansel Adams and John Muir, who have each gone before, telling the way – leading you to a place your heart was meant to be, if even for just a few brief moments. On this visit, our first (and surely, not our last) – we got a taste for that – and that was hardly grazing on the meat of all that is left of Yosemite for us to one day discover. Our time, limited as it was, was spent camping on the banks of the South Fork of the Merced and then the Merced itself, hiking through the giant sequoias of Mariposa Grove, playing in the rain, snow, and sun, hiking to stunning (and misty!) waterfalls such as Bridal Veil and Yosemite Falls, and driving to points and overlooks you only dream of as a person who appreciates feeling small and wondering at great expanses.

Still as small as one feels, you can’t help but feel greatness – both of Creator and creation – grow as the hours pass on. As laughter and joy – disappointment and challenges, are shared with such company in such a context as Yosemite. One can’t help but feel the need to go back, as I have every day since we left.

Breaking Clear Away

Kristine Neeley — Thu, 26 May 2011 14:00:32 +0000

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
- John Muir

If there is anything Cliff and I have learned so far in our years of being together, it’s that a week in the woods is one of our favorite kinds of remedies for all the ill-wishes and oddities of life. Some of my most favorite and longed for memories over the last couple of years are set in the context of moments on trips like these. Be it Wyoming, Colorado, Washington or Arizona… I could tell you what we were eating (some variety of chili, franks and beans, or peanut butter and jelly, most likely), what the air smelled like (campfire, coolness, deeply warmed rock, or heavy green), whether it was a dark and starry night or blue-sky day… but most importantly I could tell that there is no more pure place in the world for me than outside. It is there that I experience God, myself, my husband – and if we’re lucky, a few choice friends – in a way I’m not always able to in our everyday life.

So here’s to a week of not-your-everyday living. Exploring in the mountains and valleys of Yosemite, marveling at the giants of the Redwoods, wondering at the expanse of the Pacific Coast, standing at the edge of the deep abyss that is Crater Lake, and playing at the base of Lassen’s volcanic wonderland. My spirit is sure to be clean when we arrive home on June 5.

Suffice it to say, I’m out of the office ’til then

Back in Action

Kristine Neeley — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:29:08 +0000

Oh boy, this girl is rested. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. I could have used just a few more days…

I mean, when this:

is representative of what most of your days are like, it’s hard not to want them all of the time.

p.s. find me on Instagram. I love that app. Aaaand, I love my phone.

But truthfully, as lovely as days on the beach with the people you love are, I’ve been itching to hop back in the office – not necessarily for it’s locale (I mean, really, you just can’t beat staring for hours at the ocean horizon) but because of the work. Because of the faces tucked away on compact flash cards in a card wallet in a giant camera bag – some of them belonging to the very people with whom I was spending my leisurely vacation! Those faces, today, are in the process of finding their way today onto the computer and will make their way into your peripheral next week.

It’ll be a veritable blog-a-pa-looza (considering how quiet I’ve been this week) with sweet little girls and boys, and two people whose love puts me over the moon. In the meantime, I hope you’ve had a good week and have an even better weekend.

If you see me, I’ll be the one with the far away look. I left a little piece of my heart there at 406.

The Place it all Began

Kristine Neeley — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:00:27 +0000

Five years ago, about this time, I hopped in a car with my best friend and we drove to Florida. To our friend Erin’s hometown, no less, to stay at her parents’ house in Largo and enjoy some much needed time at the beach. It was Spring Break of our senior year, and it was our first official beach trip in the four years we’d been in college. Girls gone wild, it wasn’t; but that’s just the way we like it.

Beach, Slurpees, Cuban sandwiches, pizza, crab legs, reading, writing, and OSAKA. I can’t put words to the deliciousness that is Osaka sushi. That week was one I’ll never forget; late night jam sessions on the beach, my runs across the bridge, running into Ryan and friends at the restaurant. It was the night they met. Like, actually met, though they’d been around each other once before. And it’s also where, when some friends went home with Erin after graduation a couple of months later, they started falling for each other.

So it’s only fitting that we’re hopping in the car again, tomorrow, to head down there. Same car, in fact. This time, two INCREDIBLE men in tow. We’ll be reliving my precious memories there, as I haven’t been back since then – and taking some engagement photos of Natalie and Ryan in the place it all began. Aaaand, eating crazy good sushi.

Thought it’d be fun to share some pictures from the trip five years ago; in the days of the point and shoot.

That being said, I will be on vacation starting tomorrow, Friday March 4 and will be back in the office Friday, March 11.

Until then!

Lazio :: Italy Travel Photography

Kristine Neeley — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:26:30 +0000

I know that Lazio has more to offer than Rome, but it’s all I know.

And even that which I know is a bit like having stood at the edge of an ocean – the tide pulling in and out. At times it is all too much, and at others, not enough. Constantly changing, moving – and yet fixed permanently in the pages of history that come to life right in front of your eyes. It is charming and frightening, busy and still. Streets of old topped by today’s streets, lined with cars and people living with what is, quite possibly, one of the richest histories in the world.

I couldn’t have started our tour in Rome, at least at the degree to which we faced it in a night and a day. My heart and mind needed to ease its way into the life of Italy, and by the time we got back to Rome for our true visit – I was familiar and confident enough to withstand and appreciate its unique charm.

And to have saved the “looking up” for last. Because everywhere you go in Rome, it seems you are looking up – both literally and figuratively. I loved that; feeling so small, and yet sensing such grandeur you can’t help but rise to it. The politics, the faith, the art, all of it points so far back it’s impossible to comprehend – and even now I find myself processing what I saw and felt in those brief moments in the city.

These help a bit to do that.

And friends, that’s the last of Italy. Well, my version of it, at least.

Thanks – as always – for sharing in my retelling through images and brief insights into the spectacular journey this was for me. To have gone was a dream, sharing it with my best friend, and returning with a deeper sense of who I want and was made to be. It’s funny how that works, but I’m grateful it is that way.

Now, to the present…