Travel is a strange thing. The way I do it, it's work. You get up early, go hard, eat exotic foods because they are exotic, stay up late and sleep in less-than-desirable conditions. And you drag your husband around on your agenda because you are the planner. It's rewarding in quite indescribable ways. I'm a different person than I was a few years back before we started traveling constantly. Seeing the world gives you new perspectives, new ideas. It's enlightening. And exhausting. And sometimes delightful. But also sometimes miserable. It's a big world. I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to see some of it.
Every year for the last three, George has gone to Oxford to work with his colleagues there. I went two years ago and we also hit
Belgium. We fell quite in love with Flanders, so we decided to try just a tad north and this year went to The Netherlands before settling George in the old university for several weeks.
Of all the places I've traveled, and it's been a few at this point, The Netherlands strike me as the place I might most like to live. The people are refreshingly direct and simultaneously mind their own business. I've operated my entire life feeling blunt but not so in The Netherlands. I think I might fit in just fine. And there are bicycles everywhere. And the air is really, really clear.
We started the trip in Amsterdam, which is a logical place to start. We were there for five days and could easily have doubled that time. Amsterdam is packed to the brim with museums, historic sites and activities. It's an incredibly active, engaging city. We rolled in off a red eye bleary and exhausted, and so spent most of the first day wandering around in a stupor. The following day, the first activity we did, before stepping foot in a single museum, was a cheese tasting. We promptly bought 20 euro worth of cheese, that we had to cart all over the damn world. Now that it's in our fridge, I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Cheese anyone?
One of the wisest moves we made was purchasing Museumkaarten, cards that get you into all state-run museums for free (once you pay the 50 euro fee). These cards were good for basically any museum we stumbled across and they were an
amazing deal. Highly recommend to anyone spending more than just a few days in the country! They're not marketed to tourists, so you won't find any info in English, but you can buy them at most of the big museums.
Here we're at the end of one of the museums... I don't know which one. We went to all of them, because admission was included with the card, but it was a lot of checking off boxes. Yes, we went to the Van Gogh museum. No, we don't really give a rip about Van Gogh.
But what we do give a rip about, obviously, are windmills! These things are every bit as adorable and neat as they seem. George and I took our first bike trip out to Zaanse Schans during our stay in Amsterdam. It was a beautiful ride. Our butts hurt like crazy. And the windmills were super-awesome. A couple of them were operating, grinding spices or making paint. They used to be a huge industry in the region but industrialization, etc. etc.
We took a walking tour of the Red Light District, which was considerably campier than the regular walking tour of the old part of town. The guide (on the left) insisted we go into the Sex Palace. It's one of those places where you put in coins and then can watch the "live show" in a tiny booth, in a circle of other tiny booths looking in on a spinning bed of sorts. It was a unique experience.
Amsterdam was awesome and the country is so small, you really could stay there and day trip everywhere else. But it's also the most expensive city I have ever seen. Our (sort of crap) private room in the hostel was way more than I wanted to spend for a ten-day trip. Our wallets lighter, we headed to Utrecht.
More examples of stores in Europe selling just one thing.
This is Amersfoort (or Amber's Fort, if you will). We biked here. My butt hurt. The city has really, really cool old gates.
The city of Leiden has more than 100 poems on the walls of various buildings. Quirky and charming.
Upon arrival in Rotterdam, George immediately fell ill and spent the next two days in bed. I felt a little guilty, but I wasn't about to pass up on Den Haag and the other sites nearby. These are a bunch of people protesting Israel's military actions. It was a strange protest because they were pretending to be dead and it was really quiet. There were just all these people lying on the ground and probably just as many taking pictures of them.
The Escher Museum, where I was willing to drop serious, serious coin on some gift shop action. Thankfully they didn't have anything really good.
Sculpture show in Den Haag. I think I've seen this cake before, in Paris.
The beauty of the Museumkaart is that I could go in all these 15 euro museums and go straight to the highlights, without feeling I needed to "get my money's worth" by looking at a bunch of other stuff I don't care about. Art museums are cool and all but
every single city in Europe has a "world class" art museum. You can only look at so many portraits of rich people from the 1700s. It was also really fun to go into the Rijkmuseum or the Van Gogh museum and go check, check, check and skedaddle for some kebabs. Yes, if we're being realistic, most of travel is just finding something to do between mealtimes.
This is the port where some of the pilgrims sailed for America. Some left from England, others from Rotterdam (though they were also English). The pilgrims who sailed from here came to The Netherlands because they wanted to practice their religion and England was not having it. But the Dutch let everybody practice their religion, so they got all huffy about all the different practices and were worried their kids wouldn't be Protestant enough. So they hit the road for America.
Checking off more boxes, though the modern art museum in Rotterdam was really, really cool.
George maintained illness and decided not to see Adorable Windmill Town #2.
And then, George left to go to England. Because I am me, I decided to stay on and see some more of the country. After some train misery, I finally made it to Deventer, where they were having their annual book sale. The entire city was filled with book vendors. Apparently people in The Netherlands actually read.
Naturally my eye goes to wedding things.
This was my hotel. Because of the book fair, all the cheapie accommodations were booked up, so I stayed in a former convent. It was still cheaper than the hostel room in Amsterdam.
My second day in Deventer, I took a train to a bus to a bike to hang out in nature at Hogue Veluwe National Park. It was really serene and lovely.
I took this photo of dead rabbits as something of an illustration of Dutch sensibilities. Why
wouldn't you demonstrate how a dead rabbit decomposes?
For my last Netherlands stop, I dealt with some more train travails and made it to Gronigen, one of the best cities I saw. Compact, students and bikes everywhere, great modern art museum. None of which I photographed. But weird model heads in yellow shop windows? I'm all over it.
I'm not much of a biker. Actually, I've always sort of hated biking. Slumping over, wearing a helmet, huffing it up hills and trying to avoid getting run over - not fun. But biking in The Netherlands was truly wonderful. Cars
give you the right of way, there are wonderful bike paths all through the countryside and the area is flat as can be. I biked something like 10 miles to get to the sea.
The Wadden Sea, as it were. This is the very furthest north I got. You can see what looks like mud in this photo. That's because it is mud. And it goes on and on and on. When the tide comes in, it's shallow water.
After my ten miles of biking and hoping to dramatically reach water, I came to this cattle gate. The bike path just ended and I was looking at an embankment. So I hopped the gate and walked up the hill to the scene above. It wasn't quite the "I've arrived at the ocean" thing you get on the East or West Coasts of the U.S., but it was satisfying. Then I turned around and saw a bunch of baby seals at the baby seal rescue shelter. It was awesome.
And then, as these things go, it was time to move to England, reunite with George, and shoot a wedding.
The always-lovely
Kari Bellamy had me over to the Cotswolds for a second round of second-shooting in the English countryside. (Round one
here - one of my very favorite weddings ever.) The guys were doing their typical shower-five-minutes-before-leaving thing, so I just wandered around the incredibly, massively, unbelievably cute village next to their hotel and took eight million photos.
More from the wedding some day. Here's George at Stonehenge!
To be perfectly honest, the Stonehenge day was pretty miserable. We spent way, way too much money on a car rental, drove two hours to get there and as we did, some kind of horrific mid-August cold front came in, with super-gusty winds and big-time chill. We took a quick loop, tried to be interested in our audio guides, then just gave up and got hot tea in the gift shop and got back in the car. But we've now seen Stonehenge!
Turns out they don't know what the heck these people were doing with these stones. Lots of hypotheses but nobody seems to be able to come to a consensus about the stones, or all the burial mounds and things nearby. So it's a lot of "here's some big stones and where they're from - isn't that neat?" All of the "so why do I care?" questions are left quite unanswered. They're big old rocks - from far away - arranged in a circle! Inherently interesting.
Oxford tourists doing incredibly dorky tourism things. In case you can't tell, those kids are all dressed as Harry Potter. They filmed part of it in Oxford so it's a big, big thing there.
A trip to London to sightsee and visit with former clients. This is the Natural History Museum. It's a pretty great museum.
They even have Dodos.
On my last day in Europe, I took a long walk through Oxford's countryside to The Trout. You pass through Port Meadow, a large grazing land that has apparently gone untouched (been continuously grazed without tilling) for four thousand years. Or so they say. The cows and horses are incredibly chill and you can get really close to them before they start making "seriously, fuck off" noises.
At The Trout, they have at least one peacock who begs and tries to steal food off your plate.
And that is that! I'm way more excited than I thought I could be about
not having any more big trips planned. We're doing a bit of Amish country on the way to a wedding in upstate New York next week and then we'll be in New Orleans for Halloween, but other than that, we actually get to stay home for a good long while. Do laundry. Take walks. Get bored. Cook. The homebody in me is thrilled and the world-traveling, anxious, cabin-fever me hasn't quite caught up yet.
We started at the Lincoln and just walked around, enjoying this fair city we live in. Afterwards, we had beers. Photowalks are always better when there are beers at the end.
The pond at Constitution Gardens is frozen solid a good 20 feet in. I'd say the ice was at least four inches deep. No one else would stand on it with me.
But they were happy to photograph me standing on it. This is what photographer meetups look like.
And this is what giant wasps' nests look like. Terrifying! I almost never say "I'm so glad it's winter" but I did when I saw this guy.
On our way to the bar, we happened across all these skaters in Freedom Plaza. It was pretty awesome to watch them jump this thing.
And that's all for this installment. Until next time.
I decided last year that I would return to New Orleans to photograph Mardi Gras, a subject I had never taken a camera to, seeing as I developed my photography interest after school. I bought some plane tickets and finagled some places to stay (with the help of some very generous friends). And then I tried to make connections - for all the things I thought would be important for telling all sides of the New Orleans Mardi Gras story. When I arrived, though, I learned that there is so much to Mardi Gras that I had never heard of, let alone experienced. There were so many many events taking place on Mardi Gras Day - far too many to capture in one trip. I knew I either needed to make this a regular experience, or put aside the ambitions I had going in to make this a book. Now more than a month past the trip, I'm not sure what I want to do with these images. I'm quite happy with a number of them, but I don't know where they belong. Perhaps the best answer is the default: right here on this blog.
I promised myself I would go hard on this trip - not waste time, not be frivolous. But in the end, I'm not as young as I used to be and I can't control the weather. Friday night, Krewe d'Etat night, I pushed it and was very satisfied with my night photos. I stepped off the plane and immediately set out to photograph d'Etat setup and then Hermes. The timing didn't work out so great for setup, but I was out there for both parades, standing under various streetlamps that I found. It's the only way to shoot at night.
I even made it all the way to the Quarter, after a pitstop at the Trolley Stop Cafe, a favorite old stomping ground.
New Orleans is bigger than I remembered, and walking back from the Quarter to uptown that night was not pleasant. It sort of ruined me, physically, for the next day.
Through friends of friends, I was able to march in Tucks, which was definitely the highlight of the trip.
When you're "in" the parade, people pose for you.
The best part of marching was once we got to the Quarter. All along St. Charles, you really could just fall in with any group of people walking and no one would give you trouble. But you need to be with the parade when it gets to the Quarter and all the barricades are set up - folks can't just wander into the parades at this point. It was really need to be on the other side of the barricades. The energy was intense.
I spent a good deal more time in the Quarter and then set myself up to watch Endymion, but I just couldn't anymore and had to go home. Endymion is a trying parade even if you haven't put in a good five miles of walking. But with all the breakdowns and waiting and not having any friends to talk to (boo hoo), I figured it was time to go on home and rest up.
The next day was Sunday and I headed uptown to watch Thoth. I'd never spent much time watching parades from anywhere other than Drunken College Student St. Charles area. It was really fun to see the parades with the neighborhood folks - people who camp in the same place every year and watch their kids grow up together.
That night was Orpheus, and probably my favorite images from the week. The costumes and floats were so colorful, and I had a great time creating compositions with them.
Orpheus I cut short because it was crazy windy and cold. Mardi Gras Day came even chillier, and rainy. I got up early to go see Zulu, but it started raining almost immediately. The temperature was around 35 degrees and it was completely miserable. So I just packed in it in and called it a wrap. Who brings gloves to New Orleans? Not this girl.
So I finally got to photograph Mardi Gras. It was fun. And I imagine I'll be back. In the meantime, if you want to offer me a book deal, I'll be here!