855 - River Deep, Mountain High



A late Happy Valentine to everybody. No Valentine image today (as Thomas has pointed out, the heart on yesterday’s Puch motorcycle could qualify the image), it was just a lazy day.

Do you know these days of wasted opportunities that still don’t make you feel bad? It was the first sunny day in weeks, I could have gone up the mountain, and from what I saw from below, it would have been a gorgeous day.

I chose not to. At about noon I went for a walk down to the river. This is not a great nature reserve, it is just a place on the fringe of Villach, east of the big Infineon semiconductor plant, that still happens to be rural. I suspect that part of the area is a former waste deposit, or at lest they have piled up a hill of what has been dug out when they built the plant. Anyway, it’s an area where local people walk on weekends, and so did I.

It’s kind of beautiful there with a small pond, the hill that’s high enough, that from its top you see all over Villach, birdhouses that attract a lot of twitter, fields, and then the river. I walked for two hours, made a few images, went back home and … slept a little.

Later in the afternoon I drove to the local supermarket, and when I got out, I recognized, that I had missed the most spectacular sundown in something like two months. It was still impressive what was left, but in order to take an image, I would have had to change to the 70-300, and that would have cost me just those seconds before it vanished. I chose to look and remember 🙂

The Image of the Day is from a little earlier, on my way from one shopping center to the supermarket.

We all know the song from Ike & Tina Turner, and that’s not bad either, but “River Deep, Mountain High” has never sounded better than on Deep Purple’s second album, the 1968 release “The Book of Taliesyn”. Check on YouTube how good Deep Purple really were in their early days.

Edit: Well, some research has brought me to admit that Annie Lennox live is not to be dismissed either 🙂