Category Archives: On The Road

Got the rest of the photos up in the gallery.

On our last day in Moab, TJ and I got up early to go set up shots of Arches in the early day light, before the crowds show up. This was lots of fun, and we got six more shots out of the large format camera. This time without having to ask anybody to move out of the way. I thought it was pretty cool that none of the rangers driving around the park at the crack of dawn have any questions for the two of us, hiking into the desert with a giant Ansel Adams era box camera.

We also had a lot of fun setting up shots of me doing a few yoga poses. There’s a bunch in the gallery, and I’d love to go back to do more shoots like these someday.

Mark and I took off to head back to Colorado around noon, and with a few unplanned pit-stops, we made it back without much problem. We stopped a bit along the Colorado River for a few more pictures. It’s just so hard to leave such an amazing place!

I’ve started a gallery for the photos from the long weekend. Over the next few days, I’ll keep uploading new ones. Check them out!

On Friday at around noon we left the Fort and met up with my parents and my brother for the drive out to Moab. It was a long day of driving, especially with the RV heading over the mountains on I-70. After much discussion, we decided to take Utah 128 into Moab – the scenic route. TJ drove the extremely narrow winding road down the banks of the Colorado river into the desert canyons. It was a long day, with tons of glorious views, and we laid in our tent that night in the 85-degree desert air excited about the coming weekend. It might be worth noting: I didn’t use my sleeping bag the whole weekend.

We’re leaving this afternoon to spend the long weekend camping with my family and climbing in the desert. It should be a really hot, and really great trip! Here’s a shot from camping last weekend to get everybody excited about the holiday. This is a 4-second exposure of the creek that ran right next to our campsite in the San Isabel National Forest just outside of Buena Vista last weekend. I actually had the tripod and both feet in the creek, and believe me, it was cooooold.

The shot below is from my flickr site, another version is in the gallery.

The last five days I was in country were at the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) yearly conference in Perugia, Italy. The University of Perugia is in Umbria, Italy, which is about two hours northeast of Rome by train.

The photos from the last five days are in the gallery.

It was a hard, but good experience for me to travel a bit by myself. After Mark left on Monday morning, I had two days until my coworkers were due to show up, and I had to figure everything out on my own.

When I got to the town, I found out the hotel was too far away to reach by bus. I had to take the train back two towns and then a taxi to this little country hotel that was 30 miles from the conference. I was not happy. I ended up renting a car, and then spent several hours driving around, looking for parking lots, and trying to figure out my way around the crazy streets of central Italy.

The town of Perugia was pretty neat, it sits on top of a very tall hill, surrounded by high city walls and filled with old stone buildings and churches. Its small cobbled streets reminded me of Venice, but the tall houses in this city also had deep, deep basements. In fact, our poster session was held in the catacomb-like tunnels beneath the main piazza.

The conference itself was great. I got tons of great feedback, learned a lot of interesting things, and met lots of helpful people. It was so nice to be able to go out and show my work to other people, and see that they found it interesting!

It was a crazy, stressful, but wondeful week, and on Friday, I was ready to head home. We had one night at a hotel near the airport in Rome, and then 24 hours of flying and travel to get back to Fort Collins.

In all, I’d say it was a great experience, and a great trip!!! When do I get to go back? :)

Still writing up the last few posts about the trip to Italy. I put the pictures from this day in the gallery.

On our last day in Venice, we decided to explore some of the outlaying islands in the Venetian lagoon. Our goal for the day was the Byzantine-styled cathedral on the little northern island of Torchello. Check out the adventure map to see where we were in relation to Venice.

It took us a little less than 2 hours on water taxis to circle around to the north side of island of Venice, ride out across the lagoon to the far northern island of Burano, and then shuttle across to the landing on Torchello. The island was once a bustling town, with the seat of the local Bishopric in the cathedral and church on the island. But most of the canals became silted in, the population of Venice exploded, and malaria took its toll, leaving the island with only 60 residents today.

The quiet country-side setting for the old church was a welcome change for Mark and I. After a week in the loud, crowded streets of Rome and Venice, to be able to lay in green grass under a bright sun was just wonderful. The only sounds were a distant local bar open for lunch, the cries of sea gulls and frogs in the lagoon, and the lapping of shallow waves all around us.

The church itself was fantastic. As the oldest church in the Venetian area, it was wonderful to wander through the ancient buildings, looking at art and relics from the days of the early Christian church. The walls of the cathedral were covered not with renaissance frescoes, or elaborate baroque sculptures, but in beautiful Byzantine mosaics. The largest wall of the cathedral was covered in a huge mosaic telling the story of Revolations, the end of the world, and the travels of the sinful into Hell. It was elaborate and amazing. And I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. I have post-cards though, I hope to be able to scan them in and post them here eventually.

After checking out the church and cathedral, we climbed the stairs of the local bell tower (campanile). The views were great, you could see Venice on the very distant horizon, but mostly you saw gardens, houses, lagoons and quiet sea-side islands.

It was a really nice day, great to get out on boats, to get out of the city, and to see such old and beautiful buildings and artifacts. The next day we traveled back to Rome, spent the night at a nice hotel near the airport, and then put Mark on a airplane to head back to the States. I was ready to begin my trip to the conference in Perugia.

You can’t go to Venice without taking a ride in a Gondola! But they’ll make you pay out your nose for it. My photos from the little boat trip are now up in the gallery.

Gondolas have been an important part of Venetian transportation for hundreds of years. One of my favorite parts of our stay in the city was watching the Gondoliers ply their trade. The city may have felt like a giant theme park, but the gondoliers were real. Definitely authentic.

Venetian gondoliers are required by an old law to be born in Venice, and they pass down the trade from father to son. The boats are all required to be painted black, and most are elaborately decorated in an extremely sumptuous manor. The boats are asymmetrical – they curve to the right to counter the constant rowing off the right side of the boat.

The stroke mainly used is called Sculling, but not in the usual sense of rowing teams. The gondolier faces forward and moves the long oar in figure-8s behind the boat in order to provide propulsion forward. They can also use little swirls to move the boat completely sideways, backwards, and around sharp curves without any problem. Sometimes they would kick off a wall to swing the back end around, but these guys were expert boatmen, all of them.

Also, gondoliers don’t sing. Not at all. Sometimes they would have a little flotilla of boats traveling around, and one of them would include a serenading accordion player. That was always nice to see float by in the evening as you’re walking back from dinner. But gondoliers pretty much just yell at each other. They have little phrases they call when going around a blind corner, or docking, or passing other boats. The way the calls echo off the water and steep brick walls of the narrow canals is very melodic.

I think Mark’s favorite part of the whole trip to Venice occurred while we were in the gondola. We pulled into a thin canal behind a very old building, with ancient rotting wood piers and crumbling brick on either side. All of a sudden, Mark gets really excited and yells:

“Look! Look! A rat! There’s a rat swimming in the canal!” Sure enough, a very large rat was swimming away from our boat at we headed down the ancient waterway.

“Ok, now Venice is real.” Mark said as he settled back into his velvet cushion. And the gondolier chuckled to himself.

On the Forth of July last week, we hopped on a train in Rome and headed across the Italian countryside up to Venice. I’ve put the first batch of m photos up in the gallery! The pictures were all so nice, I think I’ll keep the writing here to a minimum. Check out the descriptions to the right of each photo for more info about the subjects.

The trip on the train took a little less than 6 hours, and we stopped at several towns along the way: Florence, Bologna, and Padua among others. Mark experienced instant Italian Espresso (for 3.50 euro), and I got to sit next to an old Italian man who smelled like a frat house: beer and pizza!

Arriving in Venice, the place didn’t seem real. It felt more like… a casino in Vegas. Or an expo in Epcot. It didn’t help that everybody we could see seemed to be American. The place was full to the brim with tourists, from all over the world. I suppose the Americans were just the loudest.

On our first full day in the city, we saw the view of the island from the Bell Tower, and explored the courtyards, prisons, and beautiful bridges around the Doge’s Palace.

Dinner that night was at a small restaurant in a dark alley near the Rialto Bridge. It was a wonderful seafood ratatoria. I had a whole grilled sea bass, and it was great, even though I came at the fillet from the wrong side. Walking around the city that night was warm and full of soft lights reflecting off of smoothly lapping waves. It may not have felt real, but it still felt wonderful.

Well, I’m back in Colorado. After 24 full hours of traveling yesterday, I’m feeling stiff, sore, and exhausted still. I’m moving slow, and spending some time getting photos organized and documented. I rearranged the gallery a bit, and I added a few photos to both of the sub galleries.

I want to write one more post about the other sites we saw while in Rome. Yes, the ancient center was amazing, and the Vatican full of incredible sites, but there are lots of other things to see in the Eternal City.

Fountains – You can’t walk 30 feet in Rome without stumbling on one fountain or another. Many are incredibly beautiful, and most are full of “potable” water. It’s not uncommon to see people drinking from these fountains. I only drank from the fountains with spigots that seemed to obviously be built for supplying drinking water. And I haven’t gotten sick yet!

I found these fountains very photogenic, and today I uploaded several shots of Bernini’s Fontana del Tritone, one of the fountain outside S. Maria d. Vittoria, and a few of The Fountain of the Naiads.

Churches – The fountains might be every 30ft, but it seems like the churches are closer together. I think Mark spent more time in church on this trip than he has in his entire life. :) The buildings were varied and beautiful, but here is a little about Mark and my three favorites in Rome.

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini: We wandered up to this little church by accident. It was only mentioned in a few paragraphs in our guidebook, and not given stars or anything to note how, well, bizarre the place is. They don’t allow photographs in the place, but I bought postcards and intend to scan them in.

So, for over 200 years, the brothers of of the Capuchins would take the bones of the dead and arrange them into wall decorations, alters, shelves, even lamps and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. In 3 or 4 rooms below the church, the bones of over 4,000 bodies have been glued and nailed together in the most elaborate and disturbing shrine to the dead that I have ever… well… heard of, let alone seen. There are a few full mummies, and the full skeleton of a little girl is nailed to the ceiling of the last room.

Here’s a shot from Wikipedia.org:

Santa Maria della Vittoria: We came upon this church looking for other interesting sites near the Concezione. Mark declared it to be his favorite church of the trip to Rome. The intensely baroque architecture was mostly designed and built in the 17th century, and houses two amazing sculptures by Bernini who has become one of my favorite artists.

Every square inch of this church was covered in some of the most beautiful frescos and carvings that we would see in our entire trip. Everything was in beautiful condition, and the church was small enough that there was no crowd, and you could really approach the art and spend time examining the amazing detail.

Santa Maria in Trastevere: This church is considered to be the first Christian church in Rome, and was originally built around 300 AD, when emperors were still pagan and Christianity a minority cult. The current building and many of the incredibly beautiful mosaics date from around the 12-13th centuries, or the end of the last crusade, though the church did contain many earlier carvings and works of art.

The detail and mysterious symbols in the mosaics were captivating. In the shot below, that is Jesus with a “queen” sitting beside him. Most people see that as his mother Mary, but those who have read The De Vinci Code might see a different Mary there. The six-winged angles in the top are Seraphim, ancient orders of Angels described in Judaic and Christian writings as being the highest order of Angels.