I’ve been working on a long post covering our East Coast vacation last year for some time now. But a disastrous combination of overwork and writer’s block has made it a struggle to get the piece out the door. In its place is this short update, along with an accompanying photo gallery.

Since Will’s promotion at the end of May, the summer has flown by. We’re past the midpoint now: this time next month, he’ll be in middle school. His time has been taken up by a series of different camps. He started the summer with a couple volleyball camps, as he was thinking about trying out for the school team next year. He followed that with a few weeks at KCAT, which has been a favorite of his for several years now, and next week, he’s attending a camp where he’ll learn to make Minecraft mods. Suffice it to say, he’s been busy.

Nestled in there was a two-week trip to Camp Campbell. He had a blast at his one-week mini-camp last summer, and was eager to stay longer this year. We drove up with his friend, Henry, and dropped the pair of them off on Sunday. After that, Julie and I were more or less on own for thirteen days—Julia more or less takes care of herself most of the time.

We even made plans to see the latest Mission Impossible movie, just because we could. It was a treat to go out without worrying about getting home for bedtime, but the evening was slightly marred by an incident on the drive up to the theater. We were cruising along U.S. 101 at highway speeds when something—we’re still not sure what, as it was dark and moving quickly—came out from under the car in front of us. I couldn’t swerve into an adjacent lane to avoid it, and I was hesitant to slam on the brakes and potentially cause a pileup, so I attempted to maneuver around it while staying in my lane. It didn’t work. Part of the object went under the front right wheel of my car, and after we passed it by, we could hear something scraping and dragging in that area.

We pulled off the freeway as soon as we could and pulled into a nearby parking lot. A cursory inspection revealed that the fender liner over the wheel had been torn off and was hanging on by one or two attachment points; hence, the dragging sound we heard. We tried to remove the liner completely, but lacking proper—or any, really—tools, we couldn’t get it off. That left us with a dilemma: should we continue on to the theater, scraping the damaged liner on the pavement the whole way, or should we skip the movie and drive home? We were around the halfway point, so we decided to press on and catch the film, at the risk of making a bit of a spectacle of ourselves all the way from Santa Clara to Mountain View.

The movie was a pleasant diversion, and when we emerged a few hours later, we steeled ourselves for the drive home, knowing that it would be accompanied by the sound of the dragging liner for a solid twenty-five minutes. But a minor miracle occurred: when I put the car into reverse and backed out of the spot, the liner tore off the rest of the way. We hopped out of the car, threw it in the trunk, and made our way home in blissful silence.

It turns out that we had lost our under-carriage cover in addition to the fender liner. This was an expensive part to replace, and the repair ended up costing us over $1,000. Maybe I should have slammed on the brakes after all.

But at least it was fixed, and I wouldn’t have to worry about that part ever again, right? More on that in a future post, perhaps.

That long preamble aside, the photo gallery accompanying this post includes further exploration of film photography. For this round, I switched to Ilford HP5 Plus film in place of the Kodak Tri-X I used for previous efforts. I like the results, though I’d be hard-pressed to say that they’re dramatically different from what I achieved before; maybe the contrast is a little less striking (or overstated, depending on your perspective), but the difference is subtle.

The majority of the photos cover drop-off day at Camp Campbell; I took an evening trip to Vasona Lake County Park a couple weeks later to finish off the roll. I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to play around more.

Gallery: Midsummer