Day Trip on the Road

This is a great time of year to drive on the North Carolina highways because there is so much in bloom. Many decades ago as a part of a state beautification campaign, the major highways were planted with a combination of flowers which return and are also replanted and maintained in some cases.
Bill and I went to Wilmington, NC for memorial day to visit the USS NC (memorial battleship). The whole way there and back I was able to practice snapping shots of the flowers. It's kind of hard when you're zipping by at a fast speed but I got the feel of the flowers.It is fun trying to shoot the flowers under the circumstance of speeding by (of course with Bill driving). I'll admit I occasionally try to take picture when I drive but mostly at stop lights. I've pretty much stopped doing it unless I'm a passenger because it's not really safe to combine driving with photography.
Usually when I'm taking roadside shots it's on the way to the mountains because the beach we usually go to takes us a different way. I was glad to have a chance this time of year to be heading to the part of the coast we take US 40 East on as there are so many fields of flowers.
In some cases it looks like the flowers go with a house or a farm but they will be on the highway side of the fence which is how I can tell they are part of what the state maintains.I also took some photographs on the USS NC memorial ship but the lighting wasn't great for the ones I took of the whole ship. Everything worked out great though for some shots on the ship of the guns pointing towards the sky with the signal flags in the picture.
Since Bill was in the Navy between 1968 and 1972 and served on a cruiser with some similarities to the retired ship, he was able to explain a lot about how it operated. I was amazed at how much he remembers, especially since he's older than I am, ha.
I was fascinated by the small plane on the ship. I wouldn't mind going up for a spin in that.I am not sure what bridge I was photographing as I leaned over the ship but it looked like a photo op to me. Of course everything is a photo - op for me. A seagull landing on a gun is a photo op for me. I'll admit that I'm a lot more comfortable around seagulls than I am around guns but these guns stopped firing a very long time ago.
I did find it interesting reading some of the information as well as seeing photographs of North Carolina servicemen who were stationed on the ship during World War II.A lot of the houses in historic part of Wilmington were decorated for memorial day although the lighting wasn't great for shooting them.This has been another of my long rambling all over the place posts, so I'll stop here.