Mesa Verde was more or less the last scheduled stop on our whirlwind road trip through the American southwest. We had flown into Vegas, from there it was about 2.5 hours to Zion. From Zion to Page, the city in Arizona where Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend are located, was also about 2.5 hours. And…
Mesa Verde National Park is located in the southwestern part of Colorado. It’s famous for it’s cliff dwellings, built by the Ancestral Pueblos who lived in the cliff dwellings almost a thousand years ago. The drive into the park is pretty epic, a winding road built into the side of a mesa. Mesa Verde means…
Antelope Canyon is probably the most famous and most photographed slot canyon in the world. I’ve seen it in pictures many times, in magazines, in galleries, and even in framed photographs on friends’ walls. It’s a place that I’ve wanted to see in person for a long time, and I finally got to visit and…
Zion National Park is one of my favorite places. It’s home to spectacular hikes, including Angel’s Landing, the Zion Narrows, and the Subway. These three hikes form an amazing trilogy of hikes, a trilogy that for me was finally completed this weekend, almost exactly three years after first hiking the Narrows in 2010. I did…
After a whirlwind tour of Montreal, we headed back across the border to the US, crossing back into our homeland somewhere in Vermont. Vermont for the most part was forgettable to me, we had one meal in the state capital, Montpelier, which was a surprisingly tiny town where we ate a surprisingly terrible meal considering…
The first part of our little week long road trip was planned out pretty well. We stayed one night at Caleb’s place near Cornell. Then we had booked one night at a hotel overlooking Niagara falls. From there we went to Toronto. After Toronto we had nothing planned yet. So we decided we would continue…
Across the street from the CN Tower is an old train roundhouse that has been converted into the headquarters of Steam Whistle Brewery. The brewery brews one kind of beer, a pilsner, and offers a brewery tour. This tour ended up being one of the unexpected highlights of Toronto for me. The brewery is near…
The CN Tower is one of the most famous landmarks in Toronto. For thirty four years, up until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, it was the world’s tallest man-made structure. We arrived at the CN Tower at night, about a half hour before closing, but the guy at the ticket booth said…
When traveling I like to visit the local food market. So when I discovered that Toronto had a pretty famous one, the St Lawrence Market, rated as one of the best in the world by National Geographic, I had to check it out. The market is housed in what appears to be a converted brick…
Upstate New York has some amazing scenery, and I was fortunate to be landing in the area near the peak foliage season. First stop on this road trip was to Ithaca, New York. I met my friend Bo at the airport in Newark, and from there we went to visit Caleb in Ithaca. He’s there…
This weekend Jack and I flew out to Denver to meet with Ray and drive back with him to California. On our way back we took a slight detour to Zion National Park in southern Utah to hike Angel’s Landing. On road trips there are many different conversations. At one point we talked about the…
The old country singer Willie Nelson has a song that I consider to be the epitome of road trip songs. The song is called “On the Road Again.” It begins with the words: On the road again – Just can’t wait to get on the road again. The life I love is making music with…
On my trip to Europe I brought two cameras, my Pentax SLR and my Olympus mirrorless camera. In Prague I ended up using the SLR for most of my pictures but in Vienna I ended up using the mirrorless camera exclusively. I took the subway a lot in Vienna, and didn’t want to have to…
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted… This is more or less a weekly blog, in that I more or less try to write something every week. For those few people who actually check this blog regularly, or for those who are subscribed to the feed, it might have seemed like something was wrong,…
On the last day before flying back home, I spent half a day at the Naschmarkt, a big market in Vienna not unlike the famous Pike’s Place market in Seattle. On Saturdays apparently there’s also a flea market that gets setup right next to the Naschmarkt. The flea market was incredibly crowded. The variety of…