While looking for someplace to go for a day trip, we stumbled upon a balloon festival in North Jersey. Since hot air balloons always make for great photos, I couldn’t pass it up. We bought tickets and headed to Readington Airport. Unfortunately, the day was pretty overcast and there were scattered showers throughout the day. Some of the traditional balloons were able to launch but all of the larger shaped balloons either inflated and stayed tethered or just didn’t inflate at all. As it turned out, the unexpected part that made the price of admission worth it was all of the companies that were there handing out samples of their products. It was a bizarrely eclectic mix of stuff. From Advil to Minute Rice to flavored milk and on and on, we had to make the long muddy walk to the car twice just to offload all of the stuff we’d been given! It was a fun day and we managed to stay mostly dry while watching the balloons that were brave enough to take off despite the questionable weather.
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Savannah & Daufuskie Island Photos
I just posted 2 new albums of photos. One is from our trip to Savannah and the other is from a side trip that we took while in Savannah to Daufuskie Island.
The Savannah photos include a week of Forrest Gump, traditional southern food, bucolic streets and squares lined with live oak tree covered in Spanish moss, old mansions, civil war sites/memorials, old forts, lighthouses, a historic plantation and a cemetery.
The Daufuskie photos are of a place that you may not heard of, but was the highlight of our trip. It’s a small island near Hilton Head Island. You take a ferry to get there and then travel by golf cart. Check out the my photos for a slightly more in depth description of the island.
The Savannah photos are here and the Daufuskie Island ones are here. Enjoy!
Photos from the Final Tour of the Circus
The last time I went to the circus when it rolled into Philadelphia, I was in elementary school. When we heard that Ringling Brothers was shutting down the circus for good this year, we decided that we should go see its last hurrah. We splurged a little and got seats in the second row. There were two separate touring shows this year. The one that came to Philadelphia was “Out of this World.” (The other being “Circus Xtreme.”) Wow, what a difference from the last time I saw the show. I remember seeing Gunther Gable, elephants and a unicorn. I probably don’t want to know what kind of animal rights violations were committed in the production of the unicorn, but I did miss the elephants. As for Gunther, there was a big cat trainer there who was also quite good. The other surprising part was that besides the acrobats, clowns, contortionists, dog trainers, etc., a portion of the show was also performed on ice. Add some horse stunts, motorcycles in a steel sphere and a menagerie of animals including a kangaroo and you have quite a fun spectacle. It’s really sad that this will be the last year that anyone will get to experience it.
Relive the circus experience by checking out my photos here.
Philadelphia Flower Show Photos
Despite living in the Philadelphia area my entire life, I’ve never gone to the annual Philadelphia Flower Show. I’m not necessarily a flower enthusiast, but I’m a photographer and have spent plenty of time photographing flowers elsewhere like Longwood Gardens, the Macy’s Flower Show in Chicago and many other places. This year’s theme was Holland and tulips are my favorite flowers to photograph so how could I resist? Despite it being a damp rainy day, we hopped on the train to Center City and spent the day indoors enjoying the sights and sounds (Dutch techno light show, anyone? See the video below.). It’s truly amazing to see what the Philadelphia Horticultural Society builds inside the convention center. Besides flowers, the amount of stuff they load in there, trees, landscaping, tons of dirt and mulch, art exhibits, etc. is beyond impressive. It made for a fun (and colorful) day.
Twenty Years Already?
Everyone likes milestones that end in zero. Whether it’s a birthday or anniversary counted in years, months or days, if it ends in a zero, people like to celebrate it. So, I feel only right to mention that this website has been hanging around on the web for 20 years now. What started out as a free set of webpages on AOL when I was in high school has slowly grown over the years. I don’t pay as much attention to it as I did years ago; haven’t revamped in quite a while and I still maintain it using mostly static HTML pages (except this blog section which runs on WordPress), which no one really does anymore. I keep saying that I’m going to redo the entire site using a content management system, but I don’t know when I’ll get around to that for real. It certainly will make managing the huge photos section easier.
Speaking of the photos on the site, they’re the main reason it still exists. They’re what most people come here to see. At last count, there were about 7500 photos spanning 18 years of travel, family events and any of photos that I felt were worth sharing at the time. Why aren’t there 20 years of photos? Well, prior to that no one was using a digital camera! Hell, when I started posting photos I was actually using a camera that took floppy disks! Read more about that here.
Anyway, if you want to feel nostalgic about how old this site is and how far it’s come along, take a look a page that’s having its own 10th anniversary. I created it commemoration of another round number anniversary, 10 years. It shows what the site originally looked like and how it progressed during its first decade. If you think the site seems dated now, take a look at what it used to look like! I would make another retrospective for 20 years, but honestly, it hasn’t changed much since then. It’s just grown some.
As always, thanks for checking out the site. As long as I continue to hear from enough people who enjoy it, I’ll keep maintaining it and will try to continue to keep it going for another 20 years.
Canadian Maritimes Videos Posted
Just in case you couldn’t figure it out from all of the tweets, Google+ posts and YouTube notifications that were generated earlier today, I finally uploaded the videos I took during my trip to the Canadian Maritimes back in August. There are 2 videos from the Digby Scallop Days festival in Nova Scotia and 4 from the bagpipe and Celtic/Highland dancing show (Highland Thunder) that we went to at the College of Piping & Celtic Performing Arts of Canada in PEI.
Take a moment to check them out here and if you haven’t seen my photos from that trip, those are available too. Also, if you’ve never considered a trip to the Canadian Maritimes, I highly recommend it.
Canadian Maritimes Videos Posted
Just in case you couldn’t figure it out from all of the tweets, Google+ posts and YouTube notifications that were generated earlier today, I finally uploaded the videos I took during my trip to the Canadian Maritimes back in August. There are 2 videos from the Digby Scallop Days festival in Nova Scotia and 4 from the bagpipe and Celtic/Highland dancing show (Highland Thunder) that we went to at the College of Piping & Celtic Performing Arts of Canada in PEI.
Take a moment to check them out here and if you haven’t seen my photos from that trip, those are available too. Also, if you’ve never considered a trip to the Canadian Maritimes, I highly recommend it.
Lake Wallenpaupack Photos
I just posted the last of my photos from 2016. Back in October, we spent a long weekend at Lake Wallenpaupack, a man-made lake in the Northern Poconos created as a reservoir for a hydroelectric plant. Because we left in the evening after work, we stopped and spent a night at Sands in Bethlehem before heading the rest of the way up to the Poconos. Our first stop was in Honesdale to board a train for a scenic ride along the path of the former Delaware and Hudson Canal to check out the beautiful Fall foliage. We then headed to Hawley to check in to our motel right across the street from the lake. We sent much of the weekend walking and driving around the lake and exploring downtown Hawley. Along the way we found time to stop at a few very cool diners. After heading out of town, on our way home, we went to a cider mill because nothing says Fall like a cider mill. Then we visited the home of the first chief of the US Forest Service, Grey Towers. It’s now a national historic landmark and museum. All in all, it was a slower paced, more relaxing vacation than we usually like to take, but it was still a lot of fun.
Chicago Photos
I finally posted my MANY photos from my trip to Chicago.
Chicago is one of those places that I’ve been familiar with through the years mainly because of so many various TV shows set there. As a kid I watched Perfect Strangers (anyone remember TGIF?). In high school and college it was ER and Chicago Hope. Then more recently it’s been NBC’s Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med. On top of this, I feel like I know Chicago and the rest of Chicagoland because I’ve been a loyal listener of the Eric & Kathy morning show on WTMX in Chicago for well over a decade. However, I’d never actually been to the Windy City. This trip finally corrected that.
We spent 7 days in Chicago. We stayed right downtown in the Loop, a block south of the river. Over the course of the week, we walked approximately 50 miles, climbed 201 flights of stairs and road the L 22 times. Needless to say, we covered much of the city (at least the downtown area) while even finding time to spend a relaxing evening with a cousin who lives out there.
To say that Chicago is an incredible food city is an understatement. My normal diet was suspended for the week as we check out the best places to get real Chicago deep dish pizza, Chicago dogs and Italian beef along with stops at Harry Caray’s and Mike Ditka’s. Oh, and don’t forget the Portillo’s chocolate cake.