The sky cleared for this 16:55 sunset photo with visible planet (Venus, or Jupiter?) as we powered north from Trondheim on Wednesday. It was a harbinger of the clear skies for our two hour show later on 🙂
Above is from my camera, whose maximum exposure length is less than Gary’s, with whom I’m traveling. Below is from Gary. (That’s me, all bundled up.) These’ll view better on a full screen without much lighting around. The one above corresponds better to what my eyes felt they saw than the longer exposure Gary got. My eyes saw faint but definite shifting lights against the stars. The lights can be very subtle, but constantly shifted, at least during the two hours we watched them last night and this morning. A guy I chatted with on the boat this morning, who’s lived in Trondheim nearly forty years, saw red lights on New Year’s eve for the first time ever. At first it was easy to mistake them for fog or clouds, but then they intensified, or moved. The eye itself can’t see the colors as well, but cameras can capture them with time exposures.
We crossed the arctic circle around 8:15 this morning, so this is the first shot you’ve seen from inside the artic circle at sea level on this blog. (The full-view metadata will give you a tag to the nearest town, if you’re viewing this on mobile.) Another momentous event happened for two hours between yesterday 23:30 and today 01:30, but those are harder photos to take and judge fit for blog purposes. So stay tuned 🙂
This is the Norwegian coastline a bit north, I think, of Ulsteinvik. Our boat left Bergen yesterday, and should dock at Kirkenes Sunday morning. Take a guess what we hope to see, and what I hope to share with you from this journey :-). First, we’ll catch up on this series, which had to take a short pause while awaiting this cruise.
At the top of the above photo is a bit of a hidden little island that’s tucked on the edge of my local park, Sloterpark. Curious about it, I walked over to see that it’s some kind of youth club recreation area, and though I wasn’t able to photograph them well, I’d like you to imagine a dozen or so teenagers zipping through the breaks in the trees on mountain bikes. I think they’ve turned it into a mini mountain bike race course or something. Below are the usual-suspect islands along the edges of the main Sloterplas flood-control & canal-navigation lake next to which I’ve lived since August 2023.
So after all that talk of Swiss history I thought I’d finally show you the few salvageable images I took while the train was heading north from Bellinzona to the Gotthard base tunnel en route to Zurich, the day after all those castle shots. I expect that highway bridge you see below is carrying traffic up to the car part of the same pass we were heading for, but can’t be certain. Sorry for any of the train-motion and window-blur effects that linger after my cropping and retouching.
Et voila, that Tibetan hanging bridge across a gorge in the hills northwest of Bellinzona (en route to Locarno) that I’ve been promising to show you for more than two months. There’ll be one or two more of this location, likely in a different series you can guess.
First of several posts we’ll share from the Chateau de Vincennes, abutting Bois de Vincennes to the east of Paris. What you see here is the keep in the foreground – completed in the 1300s under Charles V, when French kings were feeling vulnerable after one of them had been captured by the English, and others made uncomfortable by public demonstrations and protests too close for comfort to their palace in the heart of the city. In the background you see parts of the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, completed in the 1500s under Henri II but begun under Charles V in the 1300s. Lots of interruptions due to wars, money troubles and even a brief occupation by the English Henry V after his troops won the battle of Agincourt – and in fact it seems he died here at Vincennes, another “who knew” moment. Below you see some of the classical palaces built later: more on that later :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 