Skip to main content

Home Travel

I know I haven't posted about travel in a while now, and that's a shame for the handful of you who liked looking at photos from around the world. On the other hand, it saves you from having to read about it all the time. I'm going to try to temper all of that by instituting Travel Tuesdays. I'll post something about travel on Tuesdays and Tuesdays only. In a happy accident, I posted a brief write-up of our honeymoon last Tuesday, but we're pretending that this whole idea starts today.

To start off this new idea, it only makes sense to start close to home. Upon returning to the USA, Jenna and I moved to the west side of Cleveland despite how it has almost nothing in common with Italy. She got a job on the far-west side and I followed. While there are ups and downs in Cleveland, we've picked out a couple of favorite, beautiful spots.

And then we bought a nicer camera than our cell phones so we could take some cool photos, starting with the Rocky River reservation right next to our house.


While there's plenty to see in the park, we might've waited too long to get a good camera because the leaves have almost entirely fallen by now, leaving us with a lot of bare trees and a general lack of reds in the canopy. Sad, right?

Nope, because University Circle still has its colors, for some reason. We went over to Lakeview Cemetery the week before buying our new camera and it was the final inspiration to make that purchase; the colors were perfect and we only had our (serviceable) cell phone cameras to capture those shots. Upon return, we were met with just enough to get us by...



We were able to get a couple of good shots near Wade chapel, plus a ton of super-colorful photos of the trees as we messed around with various settings on the camera. Of course, we also stopped at University Circle itself and played with the single-color filters on the camera, plus a few others.




Really, we're just getting started with this camera and with photographing Cleveland. There are endless places for great views and great shots: Edgewater, University Circle, The Metroparks, Lakeview, Voinovich Park (is it still called that? I think so...), and plenty of others. I advise anyone reading this to get out and try to find some cool shots of this city - there's an awful lot of it you've probably never seen.


Oh, and here's a parting shot.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hyraxes and Elephants and Africa

Sometimes you read things online that can't be true. Sometimes those things turn out to be true. About a year ago I read that the hyrax is the closest living relative to the elephant. The hyrax is roughly the size of a domesticated rabbit - maybe smaller - and looks like a mix between a capybara and a rat. Here is its wiki page . It's amazing. The genetic similarities (if you don't read the wiki page) are because they have similar testicle situations (great band name), their mammaries are patterned in a way that's similar to manatees and elephants, and their "tusks" come from the incisors (same as elephants) whereas almost all animals have "tusks" from their canine teeth. How can something that maxes out at about 10 pounds be nearest relative to something that weighs about 200 pounds at birth? Science is amazing. And while I do want to explore how the above question can be answered, I'll do that on my own time or read about it on the intern...

Shenandoah, Northern Virginia, and Racists

Jenna and I spent a chunk of this week in Northern Virginia, in the area around Shenandoah National Park. Shenandoah (which it turns out I've been pronouncing incorrectly for my entire life) was great. There were hikes of all levels and lengths, varying difficulty, varying crowd-levels, and lots more. The park wasn't in full-swing yet, as some of the camping areas don't open until "summer," but there were still plenty of people out enjoying nature, which is nice. Being in nature gets me thinking. After a day of driving along Skyline Drive and doing several small hikes, we hiked a trail called Bearfence . After an incredibly fun scramble up the rocks to the actual peak, we were greeted with what I can only imagine is the best lookout point in the entire park. Sitting on top of a mountain - looking over dozens of other mountains - is a special feeling. As tiny houses in tiny faraway towns fill your vision, you start to think about how those are just people. From...

Valentine's Day

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...