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Urban Garden.117

Trying to enjoy Vondelpark and all my other urban-garden walks as much as possible while there are still leaves on the trees, especially since those leaves are changing color daily 🙂

Urban Canals.107

So this was obviously some kind of competition, festival or both which I biked past on my way home from a glorious team-tennis Saturday recently. Tap or click on the image below & then enlarge it, and you’ll see a boat being lifted out of the water by a crane. I guess many of these boats were carried in by road rather than coming under their own power along canals from farther away 🙂
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Coasting.36

Small Wonders.146

A few busy bees are still pursuing all the pollen they can while there are still flowers to pollinate :-).

City Views.146

Dakar is the westernmost point on continental mainland Africa. (Cabo Verde, more or less due west out into the Atlantic Ocean, is I believe the westernmost African nation overall?) I’ll mostly be showing you Dakar images in the “Coasting” series because, as it happens, I really only had early mornings and evenings free to explore during my short stay there, our hotel was by the beach, and what better wayto begin or end a day than with a walk on the beach?
That said, I was able to photograph this very impressive African Resistance Monument from a distance, as seen from the offices where I was in meetings most of each day. I’m reasonably certain that I’ll get back to Dakar again, hopefully with slightly better timing to give myself a weekend day to get out & experience this more up close.

Urban Garden.116

Same walk as the last entry: you get a sense why this is one of my favorite walk routes when the sun is shining, I trust? On the last warm swimmy day of August or early September, I followed a tennis outing (my club courts are a short bike ride behind and right, from the perspective of the photo above) with a swim on the far shore of this lake…but though we did see a few natives swimming on this outing, my bones would find the wind and air temperatures much too cold to brave those waters any more. We’re looking north across Nieuwe Meer, from the edge of Amsterdamse Bos, for anyone who wants to map-check any of it.

Urban Garden.115

Back to the Bosbaan in Amsterdamse Bos on a lovely early-autumn evening. Note the moon just below the airplanes’ approach path to Schiphol, in the photos below. A well-placed bench allows one not only to contemplate the moon, the sky, the trees, the planes and the Bosbaan (the forest water track or water course, I guess) itself, but also to rest the weary legs.

Urban Canals.105

You’ve seen almost this exact same view under very different light conditions in an earlier post. Neal will recognize the Scheepvaartmuseum (aka National Maritime Museum), and one of the tall ships which are (I believe?) a living part of its collection.

Coasting.35

An earlier post noted that I was briefly in Dakar (Senegal) recently. I took these during my flight from Madrid to Dakar, as the plane soared over the coastline of northern Morocco after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. Since the plane didn’t have in-seat screens, it wasn’t possible for me to pinpoint which city we’re seeing down there but it seems possible it’s Ceuta, one of those little Spanish post-colonial enclaves carved out of the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.

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Urban Entrances.45

City Views.145

Nearly all the remaining photos from my 24 hours in Maastricht a couple weeks ago. I’ve shown some of the city from above and afar in an earlier post, where I also shared a bit of history. These are all from walks with my friend Steve around the city, plus some photos of the paintings people have made over the past century or so on the walls of the extensive underground tunnel network beneath Maastricht and extending as well to the Belgian side of the border.  (Yes, the tunnel system has been used over the centuries both for commercial smuggling and for resistance or escape during WWII.) These were formerly underground limestone mines or quarries, but are now a tourist attraction. In that earlier post I showed you a lot of Ft Sint Pieter, which sits above some portions of the tunnel system. During one French invasion, they tried to destroy the fort by setting an explosion under it, but they got the wrong location and only collapsed the cave on themselves, according to our tour guide.

Also tucked into the gallery above is an image from inside that lovely hotel which we also showed you in another earlier Maastricht post, showing the stairs up to the restaurant from the lobby, all of which are within the soaring hall of the old cloister’s church. Remarkable place to have breakfast or a drink (the bar is at the back on the ground floor as you look at it) – thanks for the treat, Steve :-). Below: photo exhibit on my walk back to the train station about people on the move in the world, and I decided to photograph the one that shows one of MSF’s search and rescue boats at work. Below that, those city walks I keep mentioning :-), as seen from the foot and bike bridge over the Maas.

Small Wonders.144

The roses are still abloom in Vondelpark’s lovely rose garden, though with this week’s rain and cooler temperatures, I I suspect the end is nigh…