End of Summer Trip to Lake Lure

Another vacation post! We've been traveling a lot this summer, and have several more trips planned over the next few months. But before fall officially begins this weekend, I wanted to share a quick recap of our trip to beautiful Lake Lure.

Lake Lure is in the NC mountains, about a four hour drive away from Raleigh, and where a lot of the scenes in Dirty Dancing were filmed. We spent four fun days in a house we rented right on the lake, hiking, swimming, canoeing and relaxing.

The lake view from the living room.

We spent a lot of time doing this, from the multiple decks, screened porch, pier and boathouse roof deck.

Originally we'd rented the two bedroom house, hoping my brother in law and his wife would be able to join us for the weekend, but they had to back out. So, since I knew I'd have the free time, I rented myself some fun little toys to play with for the weekend, from BorrowLenses.com.

So I managed to come home with over 1,200 photos from just a 4 day vacation, which is why it took me a couple weeks to get this recap out--that was a lot to sort through! I had a lot of fun finding animals to shoot though. :)

And the zoom lens was pretty amazing, even though not very practical due to its size and weight.

We had ducks in front of the lake house every day, but my favorites were this mama duck with her two babies.

So cute!

When not relaxing, we spent a lot of time in and on the water.

And since traveling with one camera is never enough, I also had my old point and shoot in its waterproof case to take out on the lake.

A zoomed in look at the great little public beach with water slides that was about a mile from the house we rented.

Our rental house, from the water.

It was perfect weather for swimming and tubing (And hiking to some beautiful waterfalls, but that's a post for another day because I've got way too many photos to cram them into this post).

And getting quacked at by ducks while in the tubes!

Our last night at the lake, clouds started moving in.

And we lit a citronella candle and watched the sun go down behind the mountains.

Soon after, thunder started rumbling in the distance, and we were treated to a pretty spectacular lightning show, behind the mountains across the lake from us. We never saw the bolts of lightning, but they sure lit up the clouds! I think I took a couple hundred photos in about a 15 minute span, just trying to capture the lightning.

It was so bright that it even was reflecting on the surface of the lake.

Have you ever rented camera equipment to test it out before?