Tag: Nevada

  • The Element Cross Country Adventure

    The Element Cross Country Adventure

    The January 2025 trip was extra special for the FMS team as it had two purposes: vintage photography on the backroads and bringing the Element from Bellingham, WA, to Yukon, OK.

    The short story is simple, Peep built up an awesome adventure rig and sold it to Dixie. I flew to Peep’s hometown and we drove backroads back to Oklahoma through Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We ventured around 2600 miles and even hit the last Blockbuster in Bend (OR) and a Buc-ees in Amarillo, (TX).

    We captured some amazing locations along the way and met wonderful people who shared their passions, like Jessie and Junior in Likely (CA), Joel with his father’s Galaxie 500 in Twentynine Palms (CA), and Daniel with a group of VW vans off CA62 near Danby Lake. A little further down that road, we ran into a French family, Bilou’s Family, that shipped their VW van over to Canada and working their way down to Panama.

    While on these explorations on the road, we do a lot of searching and looking at everything for great captures that inspire us and hope to encourage others to venture out, off the interstates to experience a slower pace and celebrate the little discoveries. When you seek, you will find and sometimes capture the ordinary that can be extraordinary, like the “Free Piano” just sitting alone off the busy road.

    This post just scratched a little of the surface from Dixie’s camera and Peep will be posting some of his favorites soon. In the meantime, follow us on Instagram, @ForgottenMainStreet, to see more dynamic captures with Fujifilm GFX cameras and vintage manual focus lenses.

    If you have questions or would like to collaborate on a vintage lens project, send us an email forgottenmainstreet@gmail.com to get it started. You can also sponsor a tank of gas on the next adventure!

    Thanks for following our photography passion project!

  • Second Adventure Trip – May 2023

    Second Adventure Trip – May 2023

    Our second FMS trip started in Las Vega, Nevada with both of us flying into Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) on May 17, 2023. Peep arrived first and picked out a beautiful BMW X3 that worked flawlessly across all the different road types we encountered on the adventure.

    I feel that future expeditions will need some type of tracking device to save the routes, backroads and places we stopped right off the pavement. The next seven days were packed with nothing but exploring and photography, with a little bit of dreaming mixed in for good measure. We both would love being full time travel warriors discovering the hidden and forgotten treasures of this great landscape called home.

    We hit the ground running to get out of Las Vegas after fueling up at our favorite sandwich shop, Jimmy John’s. I believe we headed north but can’t recall exactly because we were caught up in conversation and during these trips, there is no wrong direction.

    While the routes we choose were not entirely random, we both agreed that any sway of feeling or pull of curiosity was completely valid or no turn was a wrong turn. The common thread of this trip, and others in the future, would be focused on enjoying our limited time together and celebrating whatever discoveries were right around the next turn. In between those twisted curves, we both wanted to visit Zion National Park, Bonneville Salt Flats and maybe a quick dash along Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s crazy to think, we choose to stay away from the popular tourist attractions including Grand Canyon National Park, but we did manage to clip it heading south on US 89A.

    One of the more important lessons unearthed after getting home, we didn’t discuss the places we missed… because we didn’t miss them because no turn was a wrong turn and no direction was the incorrect way. Well, unless the sun had set and we were rushing back to a good hotel in the few pockets of civilization. In fact, the majority of our time was spend in Nevada and Utah with three of those nights near St. George, Utah, that worked great as a basecamp. You would be surprised the amazing places reached from here in a day’s drive. We did manage to work our way in and out of Arizona along the way.

    We are not going to bored you with a turn by turn guide of this adventure, but instead we want to share our images of the places off the main roads that grabbed our attention, peaked our interest and enticed our hearts. We were all inclusive on the captures, from the beautiful sunset to the automotive rusty relics and discarded towns to amazing geographical oddities of the area.

    Be sure to follow our Instagram feed and our personal accounts so you don’t miss any of the goodness as we share over the next few months.

    FMS Instagram
    Peep’s Instagram
    Dixie’s Instagram

    If you have made it this far down the post, here is a little bonus. We are designing a book of our favorite images from this trip that will be available to order by the first week of November 2023, just in time for Bedford Camera & Video’s large conference PhotoCon. I hope you can attend and meet both of us in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.