No One Knows Who They Were, or WHAT They were doing...

And if that title doesn't get Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" stuck in your head, you probably don't know where the expression, "It goes to eleven" came from either...! (The Spinal Tap parody documentary was admittedly a hit-or-miss film, but for anyone who had seen too many "serious" attempts at rock music documentaries on early MTV, it was a god-send, and Spinal Tap-isms seem to have seeped into the vocabulary of everyone in their thirties-forties today just as badly as Python-isms)

If you peer closely at today's pic, you can see Emily in her tan giant coat and me in the dark green, standing and looking at the stones of Carnac. My father shot this pic, as well as the excellent pic I posted the other day. It was a perfect day for photographing the stones, with just enough fog to give everything in the distance a properly misty, surreal feeling. I'll bet the stones would look great in snow, if we ever actually had snow here. I've read up on the stones a bit, and was glad for the opportunity to walk among them. In the summers the stones are closed off by gates, to hold back the erosion caused by thousands of tourists, but off-season the gates are open in some of the fields, and we had a great walk through the stones at Menec and especially Kerlescan, where the big stuff is. We also hiked into the woods to see the Giant of Manio and the Quadrilateral - both excellent sites, and free to wander around in and touch. It really is extraordinarily electric to lay hands on a giant stone set up by our wild ancestors 5,000 years ago. One can only wonder what they'd have thought of us there photographing their work with a digital video camera.

Speaking of which, I did assemble a short video of our trip to Carnac. It is split between the first portion, which shows the trip there and the small village of Carnac itself, and the latter portion which has a lot of us walking around among the stones, climbing the stone windmill, and playing at the Giant of Manio. I am seeding it via BitTorrent now - anyone interested in downloading can right-click HERE and choose "Save Link as", then open the torrent file in their BitTorrent client of choice for download. I'll seed it for a few days just in case anyone is interested. Just be warned that, while the standing stones are a marvelous sight, the video itself is typical homemade family video quality, so don't expect a pro documentary! Total size is around 260 meg and the file is in MPEG2 format.