The death of a camera

 While on vacation my son and I splurged and payed for a guided fishing trip.  We woke up that morning to what sounded like the worst rain storm on the planet but it turned out that those metal roofs just amplify the sound of rain.  Since we were just down the street from the outfitters we decided to walk instead of driving the truck and having my wife come and get it later.

 The guide took us up the mountains to Cades Cove which is about 20 miles into "The Great Smoky Mountains."  At the top is a scenic ten mile loop where you can spot wildlife.  You can see in the picture above a nice sized "Tom" running away from me as I chase after him trying to get a good photo.  It was so weird to see geese and turkeys hanging out together on the side of the road.

 Fly fishing is a wonderful sport.  You have your waders on, stand in a stream and try to hook the thousands of trout laughing at you.  Now there are trout all around you our guide kept telling us and all it takes is a little skill and the ability to set the hook.  He was so right on that setting the hook.  We would stand in a spot and try to catch fish with no luck, then he would wade up to you and take your pole and pull one in.  Lots of skill and setting the hook.  What you see in the picture above is a 125 dollar fish because we caught a total of two fish.  Now we did fight a few but we officially pulled two off that we caught.  Our guide caught like fifteen fish if that tells you how much skill and setting the hook this fly fishing takes.

 Above you can see my son just before he catches a fish looking like Brad Pitt in that movie "A river runs through it" or something.  He was real good with his cast but with some work he could get that setting the hook part down.  Now this was the sad moment where I took a dive into the water and my camera bit the dust.  Lucky for me I kept all other expensive electronics in the car.  If you have never fallen into water with waders on it is a bad feeling.  First you feel the initial cold around your chest, then it slowly works its way to your feet where it stays the rest of the day.  Fly fishing was interesting to judge my diabetes on.  I had my meter on me but only could test two times during the day.  I had some apples and gummy bears to snack on every hour or so.  Our guide also cooked an interesting backpacking lunch for us (of course you cant see a photo because the camera was dead by this time).  He took three zip lock bags and put one of those Pasta Ronni side dish meals in each one.  Then he boiled some water and put about two cups of water in each bag.  Then on his backpacking stove he heated up some of that half spaghetti sauce, half Alfredo sauce stuff and mixed in some chunk tuna.  Once the sauce was warm he dumped out 90% of the water in each bag and then put the cooked pasta in a bowl and poured some sauce on top.  This was a real satisfying meal with my wet toes and water logged camera.

We saw this bear in the outfitters supply store and I instantly came up with this idea to do a staged bear attack photo.  So my son was not really into this and what you get is the picture above which is me looking like I am a weirdo in a store.  It could have been a great shot.  This was the coolest display for those Deuter backpacks.  The bear had the largest backpack I have ever seen on.