I’ll post some full-resolution versions to Google Photos when I make it home, but these are some of the images from my day trip to Guimarães.
I’ll post some full-resolution versions to Google Photos when I make it home, but these are some of the images from my day trip to Guimarães.
Since tomorrow’s post is going to be a saccharine love letter about how smitten I am with Porto specifically and Portugal in general, I thought I should clear the deck with an admission that there are a few things I won’t miss about the country when I leave tomorrow. In total, these things I won’t miss are approximately 0.4% of my experience in Portugal, so please...
Prepared to be shocked, but when I was a kid, I was a bit of a nerd. One of my favorite series of books was a collection by David Macaulay with specific titles like Castle, Pyramid, Cathedral. I suspect if one were to look through the records of the library at Lockwood Elementary and Middle School, s/he would see that I still hold the record for checking those titles...
It’s fashionable to mock places and experiences that are “touristic,” a word I am loathe to believe is real. You’ll often hear travelers in the same line you’re in deriding a place as touristic. It’s undoubtedly true that there are unfortunate excesses in many tourist locales: trinkets and faux authenticity among the worst offenders, but...
My Spanish is laughable and entirely inadequate. It’s so limited that I couldn’t write that last sentence, only a sad approximation of it. Four years of high school Spanish and two years of intermittent attention in college have left me with a random collection of vocabulary words and the ability to speak in broken present tense and only really understand someone if...
Madrid is a city for the young at night, and I am an old man who typically explores during the day. But it’s a great city, and I am glad that I had a brief stopover there on my way to Portugal. I arrived late (after midnight) at my Airbnb in central Madrid after a somewhat comical series of delays and errors in my flight from Reykjavik to Madrid which included all of...
I told myself that I booked the flight to Madrid that included a 33 hour layover in Reykjavik because it saved a few hundred dollars. The truth is that I booked it because I wanted to make sure to see Iceland one more time. The trip was a bit more complicated than I had hoped it would be, as I realized in Seattle that I had left my drivers license home in Montana. A...
While it was incredibly difficult to narrow down the hundreds of photographs I took on my European journey down to a manageable number, this slideshow represents the 25 that, right now, are my favorites from the trip. They’re not necessarily the best photos–and some are quite flawed–but they capture some of the best memories and moments from my...
