Saturday – What a great day! Fall has finally arrived in Memphis, at least for the weekend.

I took a solo motorcycle trip through the St. Francis National Forest, just south of Marianna, Arkansas. There is a national byway called the Crowley’s Ridge Parkway that runs along the tops of hills though the forest. I saw no other people for more than an hour, but butterflies of all colors skimmed through the cool morning air. At one point, a couple of deer ran alongside me while I was riding before bolting into the forest.

Saturday evening, Kath and I got to catch up with Carrie and Patrick Lenahan, some friends that live in Kansas City. Dinner was a tasty and fun affair, hosted by Scott and Paige Walkup.

OK, this is the last day of the Jeff Parker Retrospective. This shot feature Jeff  riding a chairlift while on a snowboarding trip to Tahoe in February 2003. (You can see Lake Tahoe in the background.)

More shot from this trip can be seen here.

Kath and I visited Jeff and Katy in New York City in 1999 on our way to South Africa.

I’m not sure if we were about to head out for the evening or working our way back to the apartment when this was taken. I do remember that it was August. And hot…

(Facebook users: Several have mentioned that you can’t see the pics. Go to http://www.truk.com to view the images. Facebook is retarded and doesn’t show images in RSS feeds any longer. They used to. Now they don’t. Go figure.)

This picture was taken in July 1997 at my wedding. Notice that Jeff now is sporting shorter hair, indicating he has reformed his hippie ways. (Yeah, right!)

Also pictured are Aaron and Scott.

I think that this photo, which like the ones before it predate digital cameras and had to be scanned from a print, was made in New Orleans during Mardi Gras 1996. Behind Jeff and (now wife) Katy, you can see the future Megan Douglas and Dave Hanson.

I think we all look a little hung-over, for some reason…

I’m not exactly sure what Scott, Jeff, John, Aaron, and I were doing in Warsaw in late-1994, but I seem to remember that it had something to do with sightseeing, locating the Warsaw subway (hint: there isn’t one), and getting our first taste of Taco Bell in months.

In this photo, Jeff exhibits the cool confidence of a world explorer, sporting a Parker Construction t-shirt and trademark flannel. Good times, good times.

You think you might know Jeff Parker, the man, or Jeff Parker, the father, but did you know that there is also … Jeff Parker, the farmer?

I don’t exactly remember what what going on in this photo, but Jeff appears to be tilling up the dirt around one side of the House of the Rising Sun to plant a garden. Who knows how green Jeff’s thumb turned, but you can tell that he is either a master tiller or he is just getting started, because he is still mud-free…

I just got back to Memphis tonight after yet another wonderful Memorial Day weekend at the Parker Lakehouse. (Thank you, Parker Family, for the fun, fellowship, and food!)

Anyway, when we were getting ready to leave, I randomly got the idea to post a week of photos of Jeff Parker. The first one covers a trip we made to Montana and Wyoming in 1992. In this photo, we’ve made it to the Canadian border, somewhere around Glacier National Park. Jeff, in the hat, has crossed over to Canada, and I think Sarah Doering (then, Cooper) took this picture.

Today, the trip is a bit of a blur in my memory, but I remember this scene clearly. The brilliance of the day, the width of the sky, and rapidly changing weather.

Walking the concrete Mississippi River model on a beautiful day.

We visited a crocodile farm near Victoria Falls, which was actually pretty boring, but I did get to simulate what it would be like on the business end of one of these things.

In short, I didn’t even like putting my head in the mouth of a stuffed one of these monsters.

We got a chance to spend some quality time with a few of these in the wild a few years later, and my appreciation had increased by that time.

Taken on the Zimbabwe side of Victoria Falls, this is a photo of an elephant preparing to charge us while we are on a horse riding tour of a park near the river.

We got a little too close to the elephant, who turned toward us and started to act aggressively. Thankfully, our guide was there to help us slowly back away from the situation.

The scale of Victoria Falls is difficult to convey. Those little dots over my right shoulder are people on the opposite side from the falls.

When the wind is blowing, the mist lifts up and shrouds the entire canyon.

These monkeys just wandered along the edge and posed for photos, hundreds of feet up from the river below. This shot, taken in 1999, shows one stopping to pause while a rainbow appears to hit him in the head.

Is the monkey a pot of gold?

Kath got right up on the edge of the cliff overlooking Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Kath and I took a “tour” of Soweto, in an effort to learn more about this famous slum in Johannesburg. The place was a complete maze of ramshackle tin structures. If not for the cell tower in the middle of it all, I would have been completely lost.

This look means, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

This is one of my favorite photos of Kath. I took this as we were doing a beach walk at sunset in Knysna, South Africa.

We went to an elephant sanctuary near Knysna, South Africa, in 1999 and got up close with a few of them. Most of the elephants we saw were only babies. Sweet, pushy, 1-ton babies…

Kath took this photo of me while we were kayaking around a bay in the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Cintsa, South Africa, in 1999.

This was before I watched the various great white shark specials on the Discovery Channel. This area has around the highest number of reported attacks in the world, per capita. Shark Week might have me thinking twice about this these days…

Along the southern coast of South Africa, many of the hostels have this great tradition, called a sundowner. Basically, it involves buying a few boxes of wine, taking out the bags from the boxes, tying a rope to two corners of the wine bag (making it easier to sling over your shoulder), grabbing some cups and a dozen or so of the total strangers hanging around the hostel, marching up the highest sand dune you can find, and downing a few cups of wine while watching the sunset.

The only person from this photo that I remember is the guy with the stormtrooper shirt behind us.

Another photo from our South Africa trip in 1999. (I’m really seeing these for the first time in over 10 years, as I’ve just scanned them in from negatives as a part of converting all of my photos to a digital format for long-term preservation.)

We took every chance we could to ride horses on this trip. I think this picture was taken while on a sunrise ride near the town of Cintsa, along a coastal region called the Garden Route.