Chicago, in my humble opinion, is the most architecturally impressive big city in the US. Walk around its central area and you will come across monumental eye-catching buildings on nearly every block. The Great Chicago Fire that destroyed much of the city center in 1871 gave a huge impetus to…
A couple of weeks ago I was on a business trip in Chicago. This being my first long-distance foray since Austin, I had to incorporate a bit of sightseeing into the itinerary. As may be easily predicted these days, I focused on the World Heritage places that I had not…
On a business trip – what a concept, no!? – a couple of weeks ago I landed in a part of these United States that I had never been to before. In the Texan capital for less than 2 days, I could carve out an hour and a half in…
Restaurant reservations aside, a sunset cruise on a tall boat was the only pre-arranged bit of entertainment on our road trip along the Maine Coast. Late September evenings are already quite cold at those latitudes when you are on open water, but bundling up and taking ample advantage of the…
Continuing from the prior entry, here is another limited selection of pictures from various Maine locales taken during the September trip. Main Street in Camden. View to the Camden Public Library from the green of Harbor Park. The opposite views over Camden Harbor. The tall ships seen in the above…
Our itinerary along the Maine coast was structured as a road trip with a lot of comparatively small stops. There is no particular narrative that lends itself to such an approach. This tranche of visuals represents brief impressions of a quartet of such stops in different parts of the state…
The biggest town on our recent itinerary along the Maine coast hosted us the longest. Not long enough for a proper exploration, but long enough to form a good impression. Old Port and downtown area are full of architectural features of the kind that we always find delightful. Every block…
“Acadia National Park” is probably the more common way to identify the location of Mount Desert Island. It is not without reason, as the national park is a non-contiguous entity with several areas covering large portions of the island (and a couple of other islands as well). Not all of…
Lighthouses are among Maine’s best-known points of interest, and on our recent trip we specifically marked out a few for a visit. With just a couple of exceptions, they all turned out to be true highlights of the trip. Our first stop was the Portland Head Lighthouse. One of the…
You would have to go all the way back to mid-January for my last post not related to overseas travel, and even that was an output of a multi-day trip. Appearances notwithstanding, we do occasionally get out and about for short trips in our local area. Here is a recap…
Spontaneity has not been much of a feature of my traveling exploits lately, but the Christmastime trip to Washington had a bit of spontaneity in it. It was originally conceived as an opportunity for moms to do things with kids, and my participation in that was vague at best. Just…
DuSable Bridge leading practically into the Tribune Tower is one of the most commonly taken perspectives in Chicago, to a point where it deserves the designation of iconic. My take on it is neither original nor superior to any other photographs of this view. It scores pretty high on my…
One of Kimmy’s volleyball tournaments took place a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia. I have been to the City of Brotherly Love many times before, but always with a very specific intraday purpose in mind, which limited my photographic exploits. This time around, I gave myself a bigger window…
My predilection for landmark photography notwithstanding, I take a fair number of “picturesque detail” shots. They rarely end up among my favorites, precisely because they tend not to clearly associate with a specific place and therefore rarely support a specific memory. But this colorful picture taken in Quartier Petit-Champlain in…
We tacked a few hours of San Francisco sightseeing at the beginning of our recent trip to the California wine country. That time is hardly sufficient to explore anything in depth, but as this was not our first visit to the city – just a first one in many years…
In addition to spending time in Napa, we also explored its less glamorous neighbor Sonoma. There are decidedly fewer people, lower wine-tasting expenses (including a couple of places that offer complimentary tastings), but also more muted scenery. The latter was not aided by the fact that the weather turned drab…
The law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly when you hop from one wine tasting to another and, like me, never use the spitoon unless you actively dislike the wine that you are tasting. After a couple of flights, distinguishing characteristics of any given wine become nearly impossible to…
For a variety of reasons, taking a ride in a hot-air balloon never featured in our past travels. I can make many excuses for that, but the fact remains that we were missing out on something pretty breathtaking. And we were aware of that gap on our traveling resume, by…
On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon I was able to close one of the gaps in my World Heritage portfolio – re-visit and properly photograph the Independence Hall, the site that is the second geographically closest to me. The principles of freedom and democracy enshrined in the Declaration of Independence…
I visited San Francisco several times in the early aughts, but my last visit there has been over a decade ago. My photographic archives of the city are very limited. Nonetheless, I do possess one shot that perfectly summarizes how I recall San Francisco.