As with the Barcelona photos I’ve been showing you: couple days of work from Sunday to Wednesday last week, but one does have evenings and mornings for walks and enjoying wonders of the world :-). Hadn’t been to Rome since, wait for it, May 1981. Yikes.
With this post, we’re wrapping up our remaining photos of Trondheim, which is the largest city but not the capital of Norway’s Trondelag county. An interesting perception shift that came about over the course of this journey was that cities I used to think of as very far north (e.g. Trondheim, or even Bergen) I now think of as, by Norwegian standards, not really all that far north in fact. After all, they’re still below the arctic circle lol… 🙂
Above, Queen Matilda of Flanders, who is of an older generation and different from the Empress Maud of the Anarchy so well chronicled in the Cadfael series. Interesting, the succession challenges that even a royal system can bring. Human ego, I guess, eh? Last shots from my stroll around the Jardins du Luxembourg, final morning in Paris before heading off to Zermatt last October.
Our plane flew over Lago di Brecciano shortly before landing at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on Sunday afternoon. Another short work trip in a lovely and ancient city near the Mediterranean.
This is only the sixth post we’ve shown you from Tromsø, where my photo time-stamps tell me our boat pulled in right around 2:30PM on the 24th of January. The center circle photo above, and the panorama below, were taken just before Gary & I began our roughly two-hour stroll through the lingering mid-afternoon dusk to dark of the city at that time of year. Since many of you fabulous readers are in locations where it’s now getting hotter by the day, I figured a reminder of cool winter evening-afternoons might be welcome :-).
Last shots from our roughly one-hour port call at Svolvaer, “capital of the Lofoten Islands,” where we were on the ground from about 9:30 to about 10:30pm on the 23rd of January. I hope, one day, to go back for a longer stay at this time of year when the days are as long as the nights were, back in January :-).
Admit it: “that’s the Netherlands!” is not the first phrase that springs to mind when you look at the image above? Yet indeed it is; more in this post from remarkable Vlieland and its lovely lighthouse from both below and up top.
More from the Barcelona waterfront. In the space of one week, I made it from Vlieland off the northern coast of NL (for pleasure) to the Mediterranean coast (for work, but one still has one’s morning & evening walks before & after the work day).
I’ve trimmed them down a fair bit with past posts, and deletion or editing…but there are still a ton of photos in this last Lake Living post from Lake Lugano in Ticino Canton of southern Switzerland. Mostly I devote whatever I do post on this blog to reminding myself (and readers) how much beauty there is to see and be grateful for in the world around us, if we manage to engage with it directly by walking out our doors and feeling the wind in our hair, water and sun on our skin, and live a bit. So please pardon the excess … but answer me this: is excess beauty ever really too much? 🙂
My love of orchids is long-standing, and in fact a post I put up on the blog many years ago remains one of the most frequently-viewed posts, all about a magnificent orchid show on the grounds of PNG’s parliament house back in 2013…These here, including two which may or may not be orchids or close relatives, are all from a magnificent and historic temple compound in Chiang Mai.
(so much world, so little time....) 