A Photo With Something Gold

One of my favorite activities is participating in Bicycle Ride & Seek, a scavenger hunt found on Face Book.  Every month there is a new list of 10 to 12 items to find and have a photo of your bicycle taken next to.  So it is march and of course St Patrick's Day items are listed.  I'm guessing that "something gold" refers to the pot of gold found at the end of the rainbow or St Paddy's pot of gold.  When I read this I knew exactly what I wanted to photograph.

There are many gold colored items in Des Moines to take photos of.  The dome on the State Capitol building for instance.  But the Laotian Buddhist Temple is my favorite.  Watlao Buddhavath is its proper name.

Anyway, I love this place.  I wish they could get an huge influx of dough rey me and fix it up a bit.

Unfortunately, all the photos have my damn bike in it, sometimes showing the buns I could not safely squeeze into the panniers.  I need to do a proper photo job there.  But I always feel like I am an intruder whenever I take photos there.  Obviously I am an outsider stepping and riding on their sacred turf.

This is the statue I wanted to photo.  Since I was polite and rode the bicycle through the entrance instead of the exit, I almost missed this.  I did not see it when I arrived and thought they took it down and removed the pool she stands in.  On my way out I glanced up the exit and saw it.

I used this photo for Ride & Seek.

Somewhere I have a photo of my red fatbike here.  Today I rode the winter bike because it was supposed to snow.  It did snow but by the time I left the house most of it had melted.  Note that the bike has a water bottle in the cage.  Someone dropped it on the driveway and I picked it up to dispose of properly.  Note as well the white bag on top of the panniers.  no room left in the bags after my grocery run.