Ok, this is not exactly travel photography. But it is sort of landscape photography. If the landscape is the potted plants hanging on the porch rail outside my apartment. And, hey, they’re Japanese beetles. And they’ve done some traveling. In fact, like some terrible tourists, they’ve come to Minnesota recently to wreak havoc on every […]
Our first extended bike tour in our seven years of travel was a most enjoyable one arranged by Exodus Travels around the coast of Brittany. Kris has done most of the writing about what we saw and did. And you can find those accounts, and her lovely photos, here and here. I was so busy […]
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is the official name in English. It’s a beautifully somber sculpture of over 1300 concrete stelae set into an undulating ground of spaced granite pavers set intentionally to make your walking slightly precarious. And as you move further into the two-block square memorial, the ground falls away […]
We arrived late afternoon in Dinan, Brittany, a medieval city which retains most of its centuries-old architecture because it seems to have avoided most of France’s wars since just before William invaded England in 1066. We shed our biking gear, showered, and headed up a steep hill into the walled city. By the time we’d […]
One of the disappointments of visiting Germany for a church art freak like me is that so much of Germany was destroyed during World War II. That’s especially true of the tall church towers, which were often used as targeting bullseyes for Allied bombers and artillery men. Moreover, although small towns along the French German […]
There’s not a whole lot to say about sunsets, except that they are pretty. And they’re especially pretty in the Galapagos Islands when the last light glints off the wet lava rocks on the beach on Isla Floreana. Only 140 people live on the island, and very, very few tourists ever visit it. There are, […]
Marine iguanas are everywhere on the Galápagos Islands, and everywhere you see them, they seem to be in colonies of dozens, or even hundreds. So it was a bit rare to see this guy alone sunning himself on the rocks. He let me get pretty close before he scurried away. I guess the big American […]
One thing you learn right away is that sea lions are everywhere in the Galápagos. Sitting on the park benches, climbed onto boats moored in the harbor, on the steps down to boat pier, on the rocks lining the shore. And sometimes, actually frolicking in the water. It seems they seem to stay in the […]
I don’t think this guy has a name, like his predecessor Lonesome George, but he’s enjoying the good life at the Tortoise Breeding Center on Isla Isabela in the Galápagos. One of the things we learned while in the Galápagos last week is that there were, at one time, 15 species of Galápagos tortoises, and […]
The “New” Cathedral of Salamanca is, as the name suggests, one of the newer massive cathedrals of Spain. Begun in the early 1500s, it was not consecrated until 1733, over 200 years later. It’s unusual for a couple of reasons. First, that it started out in a late Gothic style, with all the linear turrets […]
