Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Concert and PAG Class outing

For the first time in about 5-6 years, I completely missed beerfest!! :-( Normally, I am a good little worker bee for beerfest, helping load trucks, set up for Friday night, working Saturday, and even cleaning up on Sunday.

This year, however, I was pretty busy and missed it. Starting with Thursday night 4/11....Connie came over to do her taxes (since I had already purchased Tax Cut). Then Friday night, we went to see Dierks Bentley in Bloomington. There were two opening acts, Luke Bryan and Bucky Covington. Luke was very entertaining, engaged the crowd, and was much better than I expected for an opening act. Bucky, on the other hand, not so much. He did put up some effort and was very energetic, but just didn't connect with the crowd. I heard a few other people saying basically the same thing during intermission. Dierks was very good (as you would expect for the headliner). I thought that things started off a little slow..he played quite a few songs before even talking to the audience. But, as the set moved along, things got better. Once he started interacting with the audience, and even brought a girl from the front row up on stage and had her "help" with audience participation (singing along) and she tried to dance with him (which he admitted he can't dance). All in all, it was a good show.

Then comes Saturday morning.....*early* Saturday morning!! We had our first class outing from my current photography class through the Peoria Art Guild. We were to meet and be ready to shoot at 6:00am in Lacon. Top that off with the cold rainy weather that morning (and the late night Friday)...I was not looking forward to this!!

So, we show up and start walking around the riverfront there taking pictures of whatever caught our eye. As I was walking around, I ended up on the opposite side of the bridge (same side of the river) taking a few pictures. By the time I was done, there was only one other person left as the others had moved on towards town. I started that way and saw a couple of people down one block, but not everyone...so I kept going taking pictures wherever the mood hit me.

As I was walking back to the river to see if I could find the rest of my class, I was stopped by a guy asking what I was doing, was I a realtor, etc... I had just taken a couple of pictures of the police station / city hall, and I figured that may have something to do with the questioning. The guy then revealed that he works for the sheriff's department and started talking about this building and that and asked if I had about 5 minutes, he would like to give me a tour of the town. Not wanting to piss off the local law, I of course said "sure". :-) We rode around town for about 15 minutes all the while him giving me a history lesson on a couple dozen houses...this one is the old house, he was the main engineer on the bridge, and this house was build by , he was sent from Chicago to tend to the Mob business in the area, this house was built by who was a little....eccentric....etc.. etc..

Anyway, he was a friendly old guy, and obviously knew damn near everything there is to know about Lacon.

After he dropped me off and I headed back to the riverfront, there was one guy left just pulling out. He said the others had already left and he stopped for some coffee and cinnamon roll.

Here are a couple of shots I got that day:
First, one of the docks:
Wet Pier

One from the "other side" of the bridge:
Bridge In Early Light

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

your shots really captured the dreariness of the day

gordo said...

Did you get any pictures of the old bridge outside of Lacon on Rt 26?

tsheets said...

No, Gordo, I didn't. I don't even recall seeing it.

gordo said...

I just assumed you might have seen it when riding your motorcycle since Rt 26 seems to be popular for bikes. Just on the south end of Lacon, there is an old bridge that doesn't connect anything. I assume it is just an old bridge that someone felt they had to keep when it got replaced. There has to be a story behind it.