I am a retired chemist with too many hobbies and too little time and money to excel at any of them. I spend lot of time working in my garden railroad behind my home. Help is hard to find and I have to do a lot of the work myself. Fortunately after building two previous garden railroads I had the foresight to build this one as an elevated garden to reduce the amount of bending and stooping required to maintain it. The layout is set up for continuous running of trains so I can sit and enjoy them with a minimum of intervention.

My wife and I enjoy traveling. The past fourteen years we have traveled in a succession of RV's. We had one fifth wheel pulled by a Dodge Dually, the rest have been diesel pushers, starting with a 2001 Tiffin Allegro Bus that wandered all over the road as well as all over the USA. . We kept upgrading every few years and our current RV is a 2019 Newmar tag axle Dutch Star 4018. We always love traveling to the national parks in the West and Southwest, riding steam trains in Colorado, visiting Florida Beaches, and assorted other destinations. We recently had a great trip to the New River Gorge in West Virginia with a stop on the way home to ride the train in Bryson City, TN. Hopefully we have a few years of RV travel left before before we sell the Dutch Star and have our children push our wheelchairs through the parks we haven't seen yet. So far they are unaware of this upcoming duty.

I got interested in serious photography in the late 1970's when I sold all my RC model airplanes and bought a high quality camera system. It used a strange recording medium called "film". I have continually upgraded as the cameras and electronics progressed. I currently use a Nikon D850 and D7100 with Nikon lenses ranging from 16 mm to 500 mm. The past several years much of my photography has been with an iPhone (currently iPhone 17), especially for pictures of the garden railroad and informal family gatherings. The Nikons are still called into action for travel photography where the various length lenses are needed and for any professional work that might arise. Whenever I can pry it away from my Grandson, I also have a DJI Mavic drone for taking some interesting photos with a very different perspective .

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