Nagano By Bike - Finale

I'm falling way behind on posting my recent photos, so I'm going to cut the trip short with this post. These are the photographic highlights after day IV.

The only one I want to comment on, is really one of my favorite photos from the trip. Artistically, I guess it's not much. It doesn't compare with some others, but as far as subjects go, I really love this one.

In all the photos, the woman feeding the calves looks deceptively young, but when she turned toward us, we could see that she was actually quite old. I guess that's part of why I love this photo. Here's an old woman, probably been a farmer her whole life, milked hundreds of calves with a heavy bucket of milk, maybe every day of her life... but look at the smile on her face. It's obvious the calves have not become just another crop... to me the smile looks as though she knows this calf on a personal basis. This calf is an individual, a familiar friend. I love the fact that she look like that after a lifetime of back-breaking work, and I would feel extremely confident drinking milk from her farm, as I trust that she treats her cows as sources of life and health, rather than a "cash cow".