That was the day that Chris and I arrived back in the U.S. after years of living in Europe on our current Plan G adventure.

Plan G actually started a few months before that, on March 31, 2015, when we left Germany (where we’ been living for 3.5 years) and turned into “tourists” in the EU. (For more on the complexities of that, as well as why our current travel adventures are called Plan G, I refer you to old blog posts here and here and here and here.)

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of our Plan G travel so far:

Phase 1: March 31-2015-June 20, 2015 : Travels in Europe

Phase 2: June 20, 2015-January 7, 2016: Travels in North America, East to West

Phase 3: January 7, 2016-September 21, 2016: Travels in North America, West Coast

Phase 4: September 21, 2016-October 16, 2016: Travels Down Under

Phase 5: October 16, 2016-November 21, 2016: Travels in North America, West to East

Phase 6: November 21, 2016-present: Travels in Europe, again

A while back Chris wrote a lovely little interactive map program for me to use to plot our travels.  He made it back when we were in Phase 2 of the trip, but I never got around to actually populating the map with all our stops, and therefore never shared it.

But I  have now made the Phase 2 map:

Plan G Phase 2 Travels in North America, East to West

That’s a static screenshot of the interactive Phase 2 map. Click on that image, and a new window will open with the interactive map. You can can zoom in and out in the interactive map to see more details, plus you can click on the markers to get more information about the trip.

That Phase 2 map shows all the places we visited from the moment we arrived back in the U.S. (on June 20, 2015) until we got to Vancouver, BC on January 7, 2016. The means it represents more than 9,100 miles of driving around North America in the little Toyota Corolla that we bought (used) in Florida in August of 2015, as well as additional mileage for travel we did by plane, bus, and rental car during that same 6 month period. Seeing everything laid out on the map is kind of fun; while I knew we travelled a lot in a relatively short period of time, I hadn’t realized just how much until I saw it all on the map all at once.

Anyway, I encourage you to let me know if you have any feedback about working with or understanding the map. As a usability professional in another lifetime, I’d like to incorporate changes based on user feedback into the maps for the rest of the phases

The area was originally a sewage treatment plant, but a while back (20 years ago? 15?) they converted the area to a fancy waste-water treatment swamp/marsh. It is rather scenic on a sunny day, particularly since there were more flowers than I’d expected.

Below are a few photos I took a couple of weeks ago.  See what you think.

Purple marsh flowers, Arcata, CA

More purple marsh flowers, Arcata, CA

“Snowflake” flower, Arcata, CA

Marsh Flower, Arcata, CA

Sunlight sparkle #1, Arcata, CA

Sunlight sparkle #2, Arcata, CA

Sunlight sparkle #3, Arcata, CA

Hint of red on a white marsh flower

Chris and I stopped here on our journey from Santa Barbara to Arcata a couple of weeks ago. It’s a stunning vantage point from which you get a view of the entire San Francisco Bay, including some iconic landmarks. Traffic was horrendous (of course) getting through San Francisco to reach this spot, but the views are stunning. I even got my “big” camera out to snap a few shots.

Of course, we now have an iPhone so we also experimented with a couple of “selfies”. Tourists – what do you expect. It was actually rather funny – we just got the iPhone a couple of weeks ago, and we don’t typically take selfies. So neither of us is very good at it. As we were trying to figure it out, with the wind whipped around us, and we tried to figure out how to get both of us (who are wildly different heights) into the shot with the bridge behind us, another woman taking photos nearby offered to help take our photo. Which was nice of her to offer … but since we were specifically trying to take a selfie, that wasn’t going to help.

Anyway, FWIW, I’ve included our selfie attempts in with the scenic photos below, just for fun.

Enjoy.

P.S. As a reminder, you can click on the photos to see larger versions.

San Francisco Panorama from GG Bridge North Vista Point

Golden Gate Bridge from North Vista Point

Alcatraz and Part of the Bay Bridge from North Vista Point

City of San Francisco from North Vista Point

Panorama showing relative location of North Vista Point

Friendly tourist and friend at the GG North Vista Point (taken by the FT’s friend)

Friendly Tourist and friend at the GG North Vista Point (taken by the Friendly Tourist)

Chris and I have been here in Santa Barbara for 2.5 weeks, but I only just started taking scenic photos of town. It’s really a very pretty place, but I had some technical difficulties with my cell phone camera.

OK, well, to be honest I accidentally dropped it.  Then the case cracked, and … fast forward to now, when I have a new cell phone and cell phone camera.  It’s a different kind of phone from what I had before, and I have to learn how to take panoramas with the new camera, because it works differently than with the old one. Of course. Sigh.

It’s going to take some getting used to. Without even trying, though,  I got some impressive iCurves.  That’s what I’m calling the phenomenon I see in the panoramic photos I took yesterday of the  long wooden pier in Santa Barbara.

You see, in person, the pier stretches in a straight line from the beach out into the water. But with my new cell phone — which is an iPhone, for those interested in knowing —  the straight pier becomes an iCurve, i.e. a curved version of a straight line seen in a panoramic photo taken with an iPhone.

Maybe I should make that iCurve™. Although maybe someone already has — I mean,  it’s really a pronounced and not-necessarily-optimal effect that is happening automatically in my panoramas, something that didn’t happen as easily with my old phone.

For example, consider the following photo, which looks normal. You can see that the beach is straight across, and the pier is perpendicular to it:

Looking back from the pier toward the beach

But here’s a look taken in the other direction and taken using the panorama mode. The photo shows the other side of the pier, and  a different beach and the hills beyond the water:

An iCurve view from the pier at the beach and hills

And, of course, it shows the pier as curved, but it’s not a real curve — it’s an iCurve™.

Here’s another look at the same beach and hills, taken while standing in a different section of the pier:

iCurve pier and iCurve wire – note the two curves are different

I am intrigued in this one how the two different curves (the pier and the wire) are curved in different ways.

But  if I can figure out how to do an iCurve™ when I want to — and crucially not get one when I don’t want do — I’ll be on to something big…

———-

P.S. Thanks for everybody’s concern about how we’re doing since by now most of you have heard that there’s a big wild-fire near Santa Barbara.  Not to worry, though – it’s not actually in Santa Barbara where we are. It’s many, many miles from where we are in fact,  so we haven’t had any effects of it here in town, fortunately.

OK, perhaps there was a little bit of fine ash dusted on the car the other day. But … that could just as easily just be dust.  I mean, get the idea in your head of the possibility of there being fine ash dust in the air, and suddenly you start thinking that the fine layer of normal dust on our white car could be from white ash, right?

Anyway, the lack of blog posts this past week have had nothing to do with any problems created for us by the fire. I’m just having problems managing my time to get everything done.

Other than that, we’re doing fine.

We arrived late in the afternoon, having driven down from Eugene, Oregon (where we’d spent the previous night). We stayed at the Curly Redwood Lodge, which is unique in that it was built from a single redwood tree. That fact is interesting, even if the architecture was pretty standard American motel style, but it was a comfortable place, and a good value, so I recommend checking it out if you have the chance.

Best of all,  it is right across from the working fishing harbor. As the sun sank slowly in the (north)west — literally — Chris and I walked over and spotted some seals playing in the water next to the boats. Fun!

The photos I snapped at that moment don’t show the seals, though. Just the sunset. But that was also fun.

Enjoy.

Crescent City Harbour, May 25, 2016

Sunset at the harbor, Crescent City, May 25, 2016

Sunset for the birds

We’ve been here in Seattle 2.5 months, and we finally got around to taking a ferry to Bainbridge Island this past Saturday.  We’ve had unusually nice, mostly sunny  weather for the past week or so. It was a more typical Seattle day on Saturday, though.

Some might call it gray, but I’ll call it atmospheric.

View of Seattle from the ferry before we left Seattle; there are mountains in the distant fog

Still, you can get a nice view of the skyline from the ferry, even when it’s gray — er, atmospheric.

Seattle, straight head

Seattle Skyline

Zooming in on the Seattle Skyline

It was interesting that from Bainbridge island, you don’t see the whole skyline, at least not from the ferry landing. Here’s a shot taken just before the ferry started moving:

Artistically toned view from Bainbridge Island

Also, the rain left behind a puddle or two that I spotted on the ferry deck on the way back. So, even if the weather wasn’t ideal, finding a reflection in a puddle is never bad.

Puddle on the Ferry

Puddle on the Ferry – #2

—–

P.S. I used to watch the tv sitcom Frazier back in the day. At the beginning, a graphic “sketched” the Seattle skyline.

Screenshot from Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-SFhhnBwdA

I’m not sure if the skyline in Frazier is actually possible.  The little pointed tower is far over to the right in the real skyline when seen from the ferry, which puts it at the opposite end of the city from the Space Needle. It’s hard to understand where you’d have to be to get the pieces put together that way, since the tower and the Needle are so far apart in reality. But maybe I just haven’t been to the right place in town to see that. Or maybe there’s just a little artistic license going on in that graphic. Anyway, FWIW, I’ve linked that screenshot to a video that someone put together of all the variations in that opening graphic on Frazier. I had no idea that the opening graphic had so many different things happening in it, but there are balloons, moons, helicopters, etc. Fun!

In any case, the main reason for the post is a photo from Volunteer Park. From a particular vantage point there you get a nice view of the Space Needle off in the distance. In fact, there is an iconic shot that you get from there that frames the Space Needle in the center of the modern art sculpture that is placed in front of the Asian Art Museum in the park. Technically, the name of the sculpture is Black Sun.

But the sculpture is referred to by locals as “The Doughnut”:

Black Sun (“The Doughnut”) sculpture

Yup, it does resemble a doughnut.

In fact, it looks just like a real doughnut that Chris and I sampled last week. Except, of course, the real doughnut didn’t provide a view of the Space Needle inside the middle like the sculpture did:

Chocolate Doughnut from “The Mighty O” in Seattle

As I said, this post was intended to be a Travel Tuesday post from Seattle. But I guess it just proves that no matter where we go or what the topic is, and despite my best intentions,  the discussion must necessarily always come back around to doughnuts.

—–

For whatever reason, this song kept running through my head when I thought about writing up this post: But the World Goes ‘Round.  Not a song about doughnuts, and not quite a crazy Broadway show tune – but it was at least written by Broadway composers, and doughnuts are at least round.  

First, the photo:

Coffee at the Cat Cafe

Now, we could think of it as representing a Monday Mystery, since it’s odd to see a cat face in a cup of coffee.

Or, we could think of it as Travel Tuesday — since it is Tuesday, after all, and the photo was taken at a Seattle coffee shop called Meowtropolitan. As you can guess from the cafe’s name it’s a special “themed” cafe all about cats. Everything at the place is either named for cats or things having to do with cats. Their other feature –  er, gimmick? — is that for a not-so-small fee you can go into the “cat lounge” and hang out with some cats. Real cats from the local shelter. You can go in and play with them, and then if you want to adopt them, they are available for that, too.

Chris and I didn’t take that option, though. They charge  $10 per 50 minute session with the cats  (although that does include the price of one coffee drink). But Chris and I get enough free chances to play with our landlady’s cat if we want to.  Paying for coffee and a cat — as it were — seems a little odd to me. But while we were there, the other 8 people in the place were all waiting for their turn to go into to play with the cats. So, I guess there are enough feline fanciers to keep the cats content.

Anyway, I’ll just stop here and leave you with this song that celebrates cats. It’s from the Broadway musical Cats. It is, after all, the the purr-fect song for today’s post…

Now, one standard postcard view of Seattle is a scene of the skyline, as seen from Gas Works Park, on the north short of Lake Union. It’s about a 15 minute walk, give or take, from where we’re staying.

Seattle city skyline from Gas Works Park

I took the photo while standing on the top of a small hill in the park. To the left of the view seen in the above photo stands the old gasworks buildings.

BTW, I found it odd that from that particular vantage point  I could see no mountains in any direction, even though I know they are all around, and I had seemingly climbed up to a height on a hill that should have been high enough to see something. Weird.

But in any case, that hilltop vantage point did cry out for a panorama photo. So, since I had my cellphone with me, I took a couple of those “sweep panorama” photos that’s easy to do with the cellphone camera.

But it had been a while since I’d taken one of those, and I’d forgotten how  easy it is to  get (accidentally or otherwise) special effects with it. The types of effects where you get multiple versions of a person, or a partial person, for example.

Odd Panorama and Seattle city skyline from Gas Works Park

Odd Panorama in Gas Works Park

Interesting, but not exactly what I’d intended. Think of it as a type of twist – it’s what you get when it’s a Travel Tuesday on a Thursday.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been here 3 weeks already. It’s also hard to believe that I’m still trying to finish getting my computer back in shape – it’s been a little more than 3 weeks since the hard drive died, and I am almost back in business, as it were.

Unfortunately, most of the time my computer is up and running I am using it for doing that not-so-fun annual ritual: taxes. You’d think it would be easy to do tax returns for  2 people with little income, no jobs and no property. But, not actually. A worksheet that we have to work through  for just one item on the basic tax return required 35 steps/decision points before coming up with what amount to enter on that one line. 35 steps.

And here I though things were complicated when we lived abroad. Well, they were, but in a different way, I guess.

Ah well.  So, while that fun is in progress, plus with my computer still needing some extra love and attention, I can’t promise regular blog posts this week. But that’s my goal by the end of the week.

In the meantime, though, here’s a glimpse of some of the area around where we’re staying.  You can’t see it from our windows, but if you go down the street and look to the south, you can actually see most of the Seattle skyline. In the following photo, if you look carefully to the right of that big evergreen tree in the middle, you can spot the Space Needle off in the distance:

Downtown Skyline, seen from Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle

Now, it’s been pretty raining and gray much the time, so it was a surprise on a clear day the other day to discover there are mountains visible both to the east and to the west.  I believe the following photo is of the Olympic Mountains to our west. (Again, this is visible if you walk down the street a little bit from where we’re staying):

Mountains near Seattle

The photo of the Cascades to the east didn’t come out with my little  cell phone camera – we’re not that close to the mountains, and the cell photo works better with unobstructed views of things in the distance. I’ll try again with my other camera when we get another clear day.

We’re staying in a cute residential neighborhood, and there are a lots of flowering trees at the moment, including some that I think are cherry trees:

Trees in bloom, Seattle, March 2016

Blossoms, Seattle, 2016

But of course the best part of the place is our location: we’re staying at the corner of Woodlawn and 42nd street:

42nd Street and Woodlawn Avenue North

That’s the best part because that’s a song cue if I ever heard one.  Here’s a link to the 42nd Street song and dance from the Broadway show by that name. In that same clip the performers  eventually go into the song We’re in the Money. The jury’s out if that will apply to us or not with the taxes this week … but we are at least staying on 42nd Street.

Anyway, I hope to be back with regular posts soon. Thanks for staying tuned until then!

Anyway, while you ponder the weather wherever you are, I hope you enjoy these two views of English Bay:

On the Water, English Bay, Vancouver

Quiet day by English Bay, Vancouver

Raven Totem Pole, Stanley Park, Vancouver

Trees in the forest, Stanley Park

Under cloudy skies, Lost Lagoon, Vancouver

Of course, the photos should more accurately be called “Vancouver Underwater”. But that gives away the secret: you see, every one of them in a reflection in water, with the photo turned upside down. I think that the photos above, though —at least at first glance — don’t give that away.  Here are different versions of those same scenes that don’t quite have the illusion perfected:

Raven Totem Pole, Stanley Park, Vancouver

Trees in the forest, Stanley Park

Under cloudy skies (uncropped), Lost Lagoon, Vancouver

Under cloudy skies through “a window”, Lost Lagoon, Vancouver

So the idea here is that I’ve taken  a photo and wind up trying to fool the observer into believing that the scene is real, and not a reflection. That is hardly a new thing for me and my photography, of course. Which is why I decided that these weren’t enough of a mystery for a Monday; but not a bad way to celebrate a Travel Tuesday.

There’s quite a nice walkway set up along the Tagus riverfront, popular in the evenings for folks to stroll, hangout, and enjoy the view.

Here’s the Friendly Tourist and his photographer in a tricky photo showing them in front of the river.

Friendly Tourist & Photographer, along the Tagus River, Lisbon

That’s “tricky” photo, not a trick one;  the windows in a structure next to the path were incredibly reflective.

From the position in the photo above, if you turn around and look down the river to your right you’ll see this:

Bridge across the Tagus River, Lisbon

Here’s another look at that bridge, taken on a different day from the other side of the bridge (on the same side of the river):

25 de Abril Bridge, Lisbon

That’s the 25 de Abril bridge in Lisbon. By design it looks remarkably like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  Oddly enough, according to Wikipedia, it was built by the same American company that built the San Francisco-Oakland bridge, but not the Golden Gate Bridge. This Lisbon bridge looks like the Golden Gate Bridge, but it’s not quite as long and, unlike the Golden Gate Bridge, the 25 de Abril bridge is a two level bridge, with the bottom level carrying trains, not cars.

A taxi driver pointed this bridge out to us as we zoomed along the river front one day. It was a bit surreal at that moment: here we were in Portugal, and a local taxi driver was describing a Portuguese landmark to a couple of Americans while talking to us in our common language — Italian.  And no, not everyone in Lisbon speaks Italian – we just so happened to keep running to people (waiters, taxi drivers) who did.  Too funny.

Anyway, the taxi driver commented that while he thought this bridge was pretty, he didn’t really approve of it. He still preferred the other bridge in town, the Vasco de Gama bridge, which he considered a more properly Portuguese landmark.

Unfortunately for my photos, though, the Vasco de Gama bridge is not as photogenic from the riverfront walkway since you can’t see easily see it from there — it’s at the other end of town. Ah well.  I’ll just have to leave you today with 2 more views of the 25 de Abril bridge:

Sunset along the Tagus, Lisbon

Twilight along the Tagus

BTW, the statue that’s lit up off the left of the bridge? If it also reminds you of something, that’s understandable. The Portuguese copy of the Golden Gate Bridge leads to the statue of Christ the King (Almada), inspired by the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio.  The bridge was built decades after the statue, but now you could say that in that little corner of Lisbon, you have different parts of the world coming together.

Odd, but a fun place to visit for on a Travel Tuesday.

Chris and I spent 6 days last week in Maryland, traveling every day into Washington, DC. You might have thought we would have seen quite a lot of the nation’s capitol. But in fact, both of us spent most of the time in the Library of Congress, working on research for my planned project on American women female photographers circa 1900. (Thanks, Chris, for spending so much time on this!) But since today is Travel Tuesday, I thought I’d at least share a few things we did see on Sunday, the one day we spent being tourists, instead of researchers.

We visited 3 musueums in 7 hours: the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian. We started in that last one and visited a very interesting exhibit on the Great Inca Road. The exhibits were interactive and well-done, and probably aimed at kids more than adulta. But if that’s their target audience, they’ve done a good job. One unexpected aspect to the museum is the cafeteria/restaurant, which serves food representative of the indigenous populations of all the Americas. We tried a stew made with beans, duck and roasted mackeral. Quite tasty.

Anyway, the only photos I took during most of the week were of the Capital building, as seen walking to the train station to the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress buildings

Capitol under construction

Overall, though, the building wasn’t too photogenic with that scaffolding. However, since I was researching photos done by women doing pictorialist, artistic photography, I was inspired just now to play a little with this other photo of the Capitol:

Capital skies

But overall, not the most photogenic moment in D.C.

However, on Sunday, we walked from the American Indian museum to the other museums, taking a path across the mall. There we saw a more typical tourist scene, so I was tempted to take a more typical tourist photo:

Washington Monument

Of course, today when looking through the photos this next one was my favorite.  Not exactly typical – but you can at least see a Washington monument in the distance.

Monument Tree, Washington, DC

Anyway, that was the trip to D.C. Fun, tiring, and very inspiring with the research we did last week. I’ll try to write up a bit more about that later this week. In the meantime, enjoy this quick tourist trip on a Travel Tuesday to D.C.

Now I should first explain that for whatever reason, Chris and I fell into a rather relaxed — read lazy — pattern that whole week in Trieste. We didn’t go to any museums, but rather spent most of our days trying different cafes, in the morning for coffee, in the evening for aperitivos. In between the cafes our main adventure each day was to wander around, see the city, and above all else find a restaurant in which to have lunch.

One day we decided to try to find a restaurant that one of Chris’ former colleagues had recommended. Before we left the apartment that morning, we opened the website page for the restaurant in the Internet browser on our iPad, so we’d have the address and a map to find it as we walked through town. We then stopped — as usual — at a coffee bar for a morning coffee, and we took out the iPad to check the address as we were sipping our coffee.

But … we couldn’t get view the page we’d left open on the iPad back int he apartment, because the iPad insists on reloading it, even if it’s already been loaded, and even if you’re not connected to the Internet. Which means that the page just displays as an error page, since it can’t reload, since you’re not connected to the internet.  That’s a most maddening design flaw, IMHO.

However, all was not lost. The barista at the coffee bar was friendly, so we asked her if she’d heard of the restaurant and knew where it was, since it was (we thought) fairly close by, we just didn’t remember the address exactly. And what do you know, she did indeed know exactly where it was,  and she kindly gave us directions to it.

But then, as we were leaving, she slipped us a business card for another place, saying that if the one we’d asked her about didn’t work out , we could try her friend’s place, as it was very good (she said). Hmm, do you trust a recommendation like that? It’s always hard to know if you’re just being lured into a “friend’s” place that will turn out to be touristy and not very good.

But we thanked her in any case and set off on our way. Following her directions to our original target, we easily found the restaurant — which turned out to be closed on Sundays.

Did I mention this was a Sunday? Right. Argh.

Ah well. All was still not lost. We pulled the business card from the barista’s friend’s place, since maybe that needed to be an option after all. However,  when we tried to find the street for the friend’s place on on our little tourist map of Trieste, the street wasn’t on the map. And we hadn’t gotten directions to that place from the barista.

Double-argh.

So our only option at that point was just  wandering  around a bit, hoping to chance upon another restaurant that was open on a Sunday. We walked for a few minutes before spying sign sign for a restaurant “near the oldest Roman arch in Trieste.” Sounds interesting, eh?  The sign’s map wasn’t exactly accurate, so we wandered around some backstreets for about 10 more minutes before finally finding that Roman arch (shown in yesterday’s post); the restaurant was to the right of the arch. The restaurant door was open, but when we went in it turned out that they weren’t serving lunch that day.

However, we had another plan. During that 10 minutes of wandering we’d noticed that a restaurant called “Osteria No” was open, so we decided to go back to find it.  However, with all the twists and turns we’d taken, we wound up taking a slightly wrong turn. But, once we realized that, we decided to  keep going, figuring we could intersect the “No” street we wanted another way, rather than having to retrace all of our steps.

As we approached where we needed to take a right turn to go to No, we passed the back entrance for what was clearly a cafe. We decided to take a left (instead of the right) to check  out the cafe, as we were building up quite an appetite what with all the wandering around.

On the downside, turning left brought us to the front of the cafe, and showed us that it was really just a glorified coffee bar and not an option for lunch.

On the upside, though, turning left brought us another street. We read the street sign and, lo and behold, we had just stumbled onto the street that the barrista friend’s restaurant was on! The street that hadn’t been on our map! Amazing. Although we still had reservations about the way we’d gotten the recommendation, we decided to take a chance on it and went in for lunch.

And…. it was by far the best meal we had in Trieste! The owners were wonderful and very friendly. The woman gave us the menu “a voce” (i.e., verbally, not written down), and as Chris commented to me later, we actually were fairly Italian, in that we listened to the menu and immediately made our choices; that’s not something we usually do that quickly, even though it was what we saw Italians do all the time.

For the wine, the guy came over and explained some options, then brought us 3 different ones to taste, so we could try them before we settled on a bottle to buy.

wine from the Serendipitous meal in Triest

Our complete meal:

– Orecchiette pasta (from Puglia) with a sauce of orata (sea bream) and calamari (squid). Outstanding!
– Orata (sea bream) baked in a shredded potato crust. The flavor of the fish under the potato crust was outstanding: juicy and flavorful.
– Wine
– 2 local digestivo drinks to finish

Consider the the high quality and large quantity of the food, it wasn’t even that expensive. We were so full we had no room for dessert. But on the way back to the hotel we did manage to stop at yet another coffee bar and happened to have one of the best espressos of the trip. A marvelous end to our accidental afternoon adventure on a Sunday in Trieste.

BTW, I meant what I said above. It really was the “mother” of all serendipity, as it wasn’t just any Sunday. It was Mother’s Day.