Hey friends,

If you know me on instagram, then you know that every other friday night I post a lot of #tobendandback photos.

You see, every other friday during the school year, my boyfriend and I make a pilgrimage from Portland to Bend, Oregon then turnaround and come back. We go there for the explicit reason of picking up his son, who lives there, and bringing him home with us for the weekend. This is about 3.5 hours each way, which makes for seven straight hours in the car! It’s like going on a road trip and ending up in the same place you started at the end of the ride. Not my favorite way to spend a friday night but it is beautiful and I sure do love that kid we pick up, always a treat to have him back with us again. Here’s the routes we take, to give you a feel for the kind of terrain we cover.

So, just over a year ago, I decided that I should make a bit of a project out of this trip and take photos along the way and post them on instagram. I have to say making these photos have made the trips more fun and my iPhone photography skills have improved greatly along the way. If you go back to the beginning of that tag (#tobendandback), you can see how much I have improved. I am starting to find it more of a challenge as I don’t want to post the same image over and over again. I use the vscocam app for a lot of my shots, I really love the filters they have and the ability to adjust exposure, highlights, etc to help make the photos more accurate to what I saw (I do wish the app was a bit faster though, sigh).

Here is just a sampling of my photos in this series (in no particular order).

Sometimes we stop along the way and see the sights a bit, but most of the time (and the majority of all the shots in this series) we just stay in the car and get through the trip. All I can say is, at least, it’s a pretty ride.

Follow along again this friday on instagram (I’m @nessavay) for more of this series.