Friday Fotos – Cowboy Up

Though they are harder and harder to come by in America, there are still some real, live cowboys left. (Click here to see a larger version of this foto.)

Bonner Bolton (at left) had just helped his dad, Toya Bolton, move a small herd of cattle across the highway near Odessa, Texas.

Bonner and his brother Brody are following in their dad’s footsteps as professional bull riders. Bonner also rides bulls on scholarship at Odessa College, the winningest junior college in the nation.

More fotos from the life of a modern cowboy are available here.

Friday Fotos – U-Haul Texas Style

Over the course of the last six weeks, we have travled more than 8000 miles by car. During that time, we have seen so many interesting and fun things, and this sign was one of them.

Ya’ll Haul is an Odessa, Texas trailer rental company that has cleverly put a Texas spin on the name of U-Haul, a nationwide trailer rental company.

Friday Fotos – You Might Be A Redneck…


…if your satelite dish is bigger than your trailer.

This nice little setup is located just outside of town, SOUTH of Nazareth, Israel.

Friday Fotos – I Call It Thistle

I call this thistle.

The flower guide book* identifies it as Tragopogon Coelesyriacus Boiss (Compositae [family]). The book describes it as a “perenial, 30 to 70 cm, glabrous or with scattered tufts of hair and an erect, unbranched stem. The lower leaves, arranged in a rosette, are widened at the base; the caulene leaves are lanceoate with acuminate tip. The rayed florets are grouped in flowerheads surrounded by bracts; the external bracts are long and triangular-acuminate, and much longer than the rays; the flowerheads are dark pink on the outside tending to purplish-brown centrally. Flowers in March and April.”

Does that mean it isn’t a thistle?

* Flowers of Israel. Boneichi & Steimatzky, Firenze, Italy, no date, pg. 59.

Friday Fotos – Land Rover Ad


This is a picture of my truck, which appeared as a Land Rover advertisement in a major outdoor magazine*.

For those interested in the details: 1995 Land Rover Defender 110. It has 400,000 km, a 2.5 litre diesel engine, factory air conditioning that doesn’t work, seatbelts for 9 (licensed for 7 pax) is fulltime 4 wheel drive and gets about 18 miles per gallon. It currently has no GPS system, trusting solely on the navigator’s map-reading abilities and has traveled Israel from border to border – north to south and east to west.

* Just kidding about the magazine advertisement, though I think this foto would look nice on slick magazine paper.