At the end of last month, I took a week off work, for reasons none other than I would lose a perfectly useable vacation week if I haven’t done so. It was my first staycation in recorded memory, a type of holiday that has never held a lot of appeal…
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…
Earlier this week we did what we usually only do only on vacation: made time to watch the sunset. We went to a place on the central Jersey coast called the Fisherman’s Cove, found a likely spot at the edge of the marina, and lingered enough to see the sun…
This favorite photograph is actually a shot that went rather wrong when it was taken. It is a picture of the lake adjoining the Dubai Mall, with Souk Al Bahar prominently shown on the left. The lower levels of Burj Khalifa skyscraper occupy part of the background on the right.…
After the somber mood of the previous installment in this series, my randomized selection popped up a picture highlighted by the azure celestial hues. A bit ironic, since this photo was taken on the British Isles, which, you know, are not habitually associated with such brilliance in the skies. This…
I live to travel. In the last decade or so there has not been a single vacation day in my life that I did not spend traveling to an interesting destination. That stat probably makes me appear more well-traveled than I actually am, compared to an average person, but you…
This is one of the most recent entries on my list of favorite shots. I stood on this spot and took this shot only about 5 months ago. This is the port of Yafo (I prefer the Hebrew transliteration to the more commonly used name of Jaffa), a millennia-old settlement…
We fell in love with Naxos from the first moment that we set foot on the island. It maintains the right balance of being lively without being overrun, even at the height of the summer holiday season. It is big enough and varied enough to offer a multitude of diversions.…
This is Iglesia de San Gil y Santa Ana that sits at the mouth of Carrer del Darro in Granada, Spain. A landmark shot of the kind that is frequently derided by landscape photography aesthetes, “Oh, look, it’s another church façade”. Except that in this case, the sunlit façade offers…
As the news from around the world keeps skewing towards negative, I am going to continue with my attempt at escapism through past travel snapshots. I have quite a few excellent shots in my portfolio that were taken in Venice (for instance here or here). And still, I count this…
In our surreal times, we all need a bit of help to take our mind off the pandemic and its consequences, both present and future. In my case – as anyone who is even cursorily familiar with me might easily guess – the thought of resuming traveling once the world…
My Jordan trip was organized by a company called Desert Eco Tours. They handled all logistics, transportation, and accommodations from the moment I approached the border crossing between Eilat and Aqaba until the moment I was crossing in reverse direction. At least a dozen different people facilitated different legs of…
My two days in Jordan gave me two of the most amazing places I have ever been to. We already talked about Petra. The following day my destination was Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum is inscribed both as a natural and a cultural World Heritage property. I left practically all of…
The “New 7 Wonders of the World” campaign run by a private foundation at the beginning of this century may have been a popularity contest susceptible to vote manipulation, but only one or two of its final selections would ever be questioned as not entirely worthy of the designation. Petra…
A few locations that I stopped by or simply passed through on my recent tour of Israel did not result in a sufficient photographic output to merit separate blog entries. Nor could they be logically combined with other locations that I covered in a dozen-plus prior posts. This catch-all entry,…