It’s Sunday night, I am on the train to Vienna. Just like in the last post, these are images taken yesterday, Saturday. Yesterday’s images, the “Silver & Gold” and the baptistery in a local church, were taken while I waited for one tire on our car to be changed.

So were the first two images of this post. Much contrary to today, yesterday was a beautiful day. You know this slightly milky light, this November light that does not warm you, but that nevertheless warms your soul. That’s how it was.

I had to wait for an hour, walked around in the neighborhood, entered a local church (that’s yesterday’s baptistery), took photos of some more industrial aspects, of street corners, a former sawmill and much more, in other words, I had a jolly good time.

Waiting for something, that’s normally nothing that I easily bear. I am not a patient man, but being forced to wait on a day like that, holding a camera in my hands, that’s pure pleasure.

I tried to find out what it is with that autofocus problem that I reported in the last post, but I did not come any further. It sometimes happens, I believe it happens mostly after I have turned the camera on, but – honestly – I am not even sure of that. It just does not happen often enough and I can’t provoke it.

For the afternoon, clouds were predicted to come from the west, thus we decided to make a trip to Carinthia’s eastern end, the region around Lavamünd / Dravograd,where river Drau / Drava leaves Carinthia and enters Slovenia. The wayside shrine is somewhere on this way.

Ask me why of all these images, I made an image of some shrubs beside a river my Image of the Day. I can’t tell. It’s something in this image, some silence, some peace, that mightily appeals to me.

It is some quality of summer lost, some quality of sweet bitterness, some sting of death, some melancholy, some essence of fall. I can’t properly explain it but I feel it when I see this image, when I remember being there, and I hope you can feel it as well.

“Roll River Roll” from Richard Hawley’s 2007 album “Lady’s Bridge” is probably not a bad match, but judge for yourself.

This is a wayside shrine in a rural livin quarter on the outskirts of Villach. This one is for Bill. I boldly claimed that our trees here in Carinthia still have leaves in their most glorious colors, but it is wearing thin. Nevertheless, I searched and found some for you

Finding a Song of the Day is not so easy. It must match in title or some line in the lyrics, I must own it, I want it to be available on YouTube, and I want to link to the lyrics. The latter is normally the least problem.

The Song of the Day is “‘Tis Autumn” from the stellar 1976 album “Fitzgerald & Pass…Again”, but although the lyrics are seemingly on every lyrics site on the planet, it’s always the text of “Autumn in New York”, regardless of where you go. Sometimes I really wonder

Hear it on YouTube.

Today was mostly a shopping and doing-things-that-need-to-be-bone day, but I found some time for photographing. This image was taken east of Klagenfurt. It was the only part of Carinthia where it did not rain.

Villach is just in the direction where we look, approximately below the darkest cloud

Wayside shrines are frequently seen in the alpine region, but Carinthia is especially famous for its big number of them. This one is of a rare kind though: it is similar to those seen in western France. Instead of being built from bricks, like a small tower, it is hewn from stone. I believe there are not more than maybe ten of them among the (I hope to remember right) about 700 in Carinthia.

The Song of the Day is “My Country” from Randy Newman’s stellar 1999 album “Bad Love”. Hear it on YouTube.

Because of a party with people from my company I arrived in Carinthia only early Saturday afternoon, and then we immediately tried our luck and drove south towards Slovenia. Well, we had no luck. Weather in Carinthia was bright and sunny, but as soon as we came out of the tunnel through the mountains, there were dense dark clouds. We had no choice but to return.

This image shows a wayside shrine on the Carinthian side of the mountains. We have literally hundreds of them in Carinthia alone, and they are a specialty of the alpine rural culture. Normally each face shows a mural of a saint, and if you follow the direction, you reach a church dedicated to that saint. Basically it is a big network of direction signs. This particular shrine is special insofar it has no murals but the images are painted on wood.

The Song of the Day is “This Place” from Joni Mitchell’s 2007 album “Shine“.