Posts in: travel

📸 Day 8: Grinch.

No photos of the guy on my camera roll, but is this Tawny Frogmouth we saw at the Norfolk Zoo not a spitting image? Just paint him green and call it a day.

A tawny frogmouth bird is perched on a wooden ledge, basking in the sunlight.

📸 Day 7: Solstice.

These stone pillars at the Kadinjača monument in Western Serbia are not exactly Stonehenge, but maybe they do align with the stars? Incidentally, the Yugoslav World War 2 monument architecture is the only kind of brutalism I can get behind.

Large, abstract stone sculptures stand on a grassy field under a clear blue sky.

📸 Day 6: Sparkle.

You don’t have to wait for the holiday season to light some sparklers. This one was from a trip to the Outer Banks, cropped to protect the innocent.

A hand is holding a lit sparkler, creating a bright, radiant effect against a dark background.

📸 Day 5: Beard.

The owner of the beard is Father Damien of Molokai, a 19th century Belgian Catholic priest whose statue stands in front of the Hawaiʻi State Capitol. He cared for leprosy patients on the island for more than a decade until himself succumbing to it, age 49.

A bronze statue of Father Damien stands prominently on a pedestal in front of a modern building with tall columns.

Let the year-in-review season begin. First up is flying, courtesy of Flighty. Here’s hoping for fewer miles travelled in 2026!

A digital passport design displaying a world map with flight paths, travel statistics, and personal information including flight numbers and distances.

Readers from Philadelphia or Philly-adjacent, please help me make sense of the place. From my limited time there, it seems to have fallen into the uncanny valley of American cities: has some history but it’s no Boston, some finance-looking people walking down the streets but it ain’t Manhattan, some tall buildings but not Chicago. Is the best thing about it that it’s a short and pleasant train ride away from both DC and NYC? Surely there’s more, but what is it?

🚄 On board the next-generation Acela. By looks alone, the “bullet-train” icon was deserved. The trip itself is marginally less rocky and maybe a few minutes faster than the “old” Acela, which was itself a minimal improvement over the Amtrak regional. It’s the tracks not the trains, alas.

Most hotels have introduced a bunch of cost-cutting measures under the guise of “saving the environment”, but this is something I can get behind. Even the tiniest leftovers are good for making your own liquid soap.

A sign from Inn by the Sea in Maine encourages guests to take slightly used bar soap home to reduce waste.

Don’t go to Maine, it sucks.

A scenic view features a marshy landscape with trees and tall grasses, a body of water, and a distant forest skyline under a partly cloudy sky.

This espresso macchiato at the Regina Palace Hotel in Stresa was the best cup of coffee I have had outside of home since, well, since the last time I’ve been to Italy.