Here we go!!! I am back from my 35-day trip to Florida and ready to start banging away on all the photos. I’ve got about 4,000 photos to add to my website, despite the rain and other setbacks. Here at the blog, I’ll be posting a little sampling of photos for each day. At the same time, I’m posting some different photos over at Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/agilitynut/

I’ll be adding each day’s batch (about 100 photos) to my website as I go. So, this whole process will take many, many months. I hope you enjoy tagging along.

The first stop on this mega-trip was in Buckeye to see Hobo Joe who took about three years to restore and, boy, did they do a terrific job. For more about this guy and what he looked like before this, see my website here:
https://www.roadarch.com/giants/az.html

I finally found out where the Hoop Dancer sign in Tucson was located & got some photos of him. The panels are ripple tin and in great shape. Heather David’s got a nice vintage postcard for context: https://www.flickr.com/photos/14696209@N02/48924229068/

I stopped by the Ignite Sign Art Museum to see what’s new. This one was recently restored. Jude dug through multiple layers of paint with different wording to discover the original name. An amazing project!

Here’s the Grant-Stone sign before it was removed in 2014. It’s safely stored at the museum until, maybe, another location can be found for it.

Here’s a nice oldie at the museum with painted metal panels. For whatever reason, there were very, very few porcelain enamel signs built in Tucson:

And here’s a nice backlit opal letter. I’m crazy about those and have a couple of pages at my website about them with lots of examples:
https://www.roadarch.com/sca/opal.html

Let’s go back to the streets for one more from Tucson — from the long-closed Wee-Went-Wong’s (surely, that can’t be the original name, right?):

More to come in a week or so, after I get Day 1’s photos up at my website.

Happy trails,

dj & the dogs