Found Friday – Serendipity Edition

We’re going camping next weekend! Yay! It’s going to be out first camping trip of the year, at Indian Lake State Park, which we’ve never been to before. I’m looking forward to going, though, and breaking out the camper for the first time since last fall. And hey, since we have an air conditioner in it, it won’t even matter if the weather is all hot and crappy!

We bought a new pop-up camper last year right before we went on vacation, which also happened to be right before the next year’s camper models came out. We bought the last one they had in stock of a current year model, and told the dealership specifically, in very clear terms, that we did not want an air conditioner – we always go camping when it’s cool outside, so we didn’t need one, or want to pay the $1800 charge, or whatever it was, for the AC and installation. We come back a week later to find our brand new camper waiting for us in the parking lot, with a brand new air conditioner installed on it. Um… what? Turns out someone screwed up and installed it anyway, and since you can’t exactly uninstall one once it’s put in – they have to cut a big hole in the roof to install it – and we refused to pay for it, since we didn’t want it anyway, we got the AC for free.

And honestly, the AC works great! It’s awesome! I’m all about going camping in the summer now! Screw it, we can just do outside stuff in the early morning and then again in the evening, and stay inside the camper and play Boggle or something when it’s 12,000 degrees outside. Free AC for the win!

Anyway, the reason I mentioned the camping trip is that last weekend, Travis and I went to an auction. It was an auction of the contents of a house owned by a guy who had recently moved, I think, into an assisted care facility. Turns out the guy worked at least part time as a professional photographer, and we scored a bunch of great items, including a few cameras, lenses, books, and a huge amount of old negatives and slides. Huge. I probably have at least 1,000 4×5 negatives shot by this guy, not to mention the smaller format ones and the slides. It’s going to be too much for me to go through, so I put some of them up in the shop. I started going through the negatives, put have only begun to make a dent in the collection.

I was startled, however, when I pulled a sleeve of negatives out from the box that was labelled “Vacation ~ Dad & Mom R At Indian Lake.” The photos were taken (or developed, maybe) on August 6, 1955. And now, 56 years later, I’ve got the opportunity to go to Indian Lake and shoot some pictures with what I’m assuming is the same camera that shot these photos originally (a 4×5 Speed Graphic, which we also bought at the auction).

It looks like they stayed in a cabin, though, so it won’t be exactly the same. But still, kind of awesome nonetheless.