Revenge Travel — My Sight

It’s been a minute. Last time you found me in your inbox I had just returned from our long strange trip Down Under. That was 13 months ago. I had a hard drive full of images and a mind full of ideas to share. But I never found the time.

Agave at the Desert Botanic Garden, 3/20/23

Just as I was about finished culling and editing the images from Australia, I was off to Japan on a trip organized by Eddie Soloway for some alumni of his workshops, followed by some time on my own in Tokyo. A few weeks after I returned from Japan, we were off on a family trip to SoCal. From there, I set off on a two-week road trip to Arizona, where I spent four days photographing two wonderful desert gardens (Desert Botanic in Scottsdale and the Boyce Thompson Arboretum nearby) with the folks from Out of Chicago. On the way back, I stopped for a few days to reacquaint myself with Joshua Tree National Park. Three weeks later we were off again, dancing with the Deadheads in Ventura at the Skull n Roses festival.

I took a break from travel in May, but by June I was back on the road to Yosemite to witness the floods. In July, we took off on another extended road trip, this time through the Pacific Northwest: A week up the Oregon coast, a week in the San Juan’s, and a solo drive back through Mt. Rainier and the Columbia River Gorge. Two weeks after I got back we were heading down to Lompoc to hang out with friends, taste some wine, and rediscover the place where I worked back in the ‘80s. Three weeks later it was the California Gold Country with old college friends.

Getting out of the rain in Barcelona, 9/15/23

A few days after that we were on a plane to Barcelona, where we spent a few days before embarking on a two-week trip through Portugal. Then another five nights in London, just because. By the time we got home I was cooked. Turns out, revenge travel is tiring.

I just discovered that phrase, in a New York Times article talking about what to expect for travel in 2024. Revenge travel, it said, was ending, so travel might be a little calmer this year. Though it’s been around for a while now, I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but it perfectly encapsulates what I was doing. The pandemic scuttled most of our travel plans in 2020. There was a slow return to travel in 2021 and 2022, but last year was the year the floodgates opened. And I, three years into “retirement,” was right there with the rest of you, making up for lost time. Revenge travel. Yep, that about sums it up.

And now I am finally crawling out from under the weight of all that travel. I’ve spent the past three months processing my experiences, along with the photographs I created along the way. I’ve got 20,000 images on my hard drives that were created over the last 13 months. More than double that if you count exposure brackets, RAW+JPGs, and alternate compositions. I’ve been slowly making my way through that trove of memories. Check out the Fresh page to see some of the images I made in Japan, Barcelona, Portugal and Australia.

Hanging on, Merced River near Wawona, 6/6/23

Along with posting photographs from my travels, I’ve spent a fair amount of time reorganizing and re-curating the galleries on my website. That project still isn’t done, but if you haven’t poked around for a while you will see there are a lot of changes already. Build is where you can find architectural subjects and other work I’ve made in the built environment. Grow is where I now share images of gardens, food and other botanical subjects, including some of the photographs I made in the desert gardens in Arizona.

My travel photography has been split in two: Near, for images made on road trips around California and the Western U.S., and Far, for photographs from more distant locations. Near is where you can see what I was up to in Joshua Tree and Yosemite. In Far, you’ll find a couple new galleries of old photographs I made in Angkor Wat and Bangkok. (We spent a few days in each place around our 2019 trip to Viet Nam, but I only recently went back to look at the images.)

You’ll also find a few new collections sprinkled around the website: Jihanki is a collection of images I made of the many vending machines that caught my eye as I traveled through Japan. Urban Trees is an ongoing project photographing trees that have scratched out an existence in environments crowded by asphalt, brick and stone. Roadside Attractions is another ongoing project that seeks to document the slow decay and disappearance of the mom-n-pop restaurants and businesses that used to define our way of life. (Fossil Fuel is another collection that grew out of that work.)

And I finally got around to updating the slideshow on my Home page to showcase some of my favorite images that I have made over the years along with some recent images that may have the same staying power. Like most of the other galleries on my website, the order in which the images are displayed resets every time you open the page, so you’ll see them in a different order each time. I like how that gives a fresh look to the page whenever it is opened. (If you have the time and interest, grab a beer and just let it scroll through everything … it’s about a 5 minute show from start to end.)

That’s it for now. There is still more to do, including getting to the photographs I made in the U.K., the Pacific NW, and around the Bay Area. But those will have to wait. It’s been 3 months since we got back from London, and I am starting to feel that itch.