This is from my "off road" segway tour of Lake Bled back in September 2014.
Back to one of the most beautiful Orthodox churches you will see anywhere, the Biserica Mănăstirii Stavropoleos in Old Town Bucharest, Romania.
A few Sundays ago, I posted a picture of the beautiful, intricately ornate interior. This Sunday, it is the beautiful, intricately ornate exterior, on the pedestrian-friendly side streets of Old Town Bucharest. This is the heart of Tourist Bucharest. But Bucharest is not very touristy. The few tourists who head to Romania immediately head off for the "Dracula" related tourist traps in the woods of Transylvania. Like some vampire focused on a throbbing neck vein. Although, I guess, if I were a vampire, throbbing arteries would be preferred because ... I'm not going there.
Bucharest does have vampire-related kitsch in the souvenir shops, but the tourist neighborhoods have waaaaaaay more Romanian Orthodox churches than vampire castles.
Visited May 2019.
Nazaré, Portugal, is known for having the largest surf-able waves on Planet Earth. It also has a funicular and one of the absolute best gelato stands anywhere (Gelatomania on the main street along the oceanfront). Either of which alone would be reason enough to visit. Then you consider the fact that Nazaré has both and you would have to be wondering why you are not there on Portugal's Atlantic Coast.
Need another reason? The Farol da Nazaré, the Nazaré Lighthouse. Excellent views of the ocean, including the mega-waves that hit town usually in November. The Farol da Nazaré also had a bunch of wooden ducks placed about the stone walls of the lighthouse/fortress. "Why?," you ask. Some people see wooden ducks on stone walls at a lighthouse and ask why. I dream of wooden ducks that never were and ask why not. (Actually, I'm more likely to dream of metal animal sculptures that never were and asking why not about those, but wooden ducks will work, too. I'm sure Robert Kennedy wouldn't mind me appropriating his quote.)
Visited September 2017.
The most ornate gelato display ever?
This is Slad Ice Cream, on Široka Ulica in Old Town Zadar in Croatia. There are other gelato stands in Old Town Zadar. There are other gelato stands on Široka Ulica. The other gelato stands may be close to having as intricate of a display, but none match this one.
Visited September 2014.
I don't have any pictures of chapels on top of snowy mountains, so for a "cool" church photo, I looked north. Alaska!
This is St. Michael's Orthodox Cathedral in Sitka, Alaska. This was the first Russian Orthodox church built in North America, from back in the time before Seward's Folly that Alaska was a little eastward extension of Russian Siberia that jumped the Bering Strait and took hold on North America.
This is from July 2017. Alaska in July is still very cool. Las Vegas is cooling down. Yesterday, I was driving the Birthday Dog to the park at dusk and the car thermometer said/read 98 degrees, which was the first time in over a week that the temperature had already dropped into the double digits at that hour. You know you've lived in Las Vegas a long time when the temperature is 98 at dusk and you're reaction is: "Oh! It's cooling down nicely!"
The heat wave here in Las Vegas is dissipating. We may have seen our last day in 2020 when the high temperature hits the one hundred and tens. Highs in the one-oh's for the foreseeable future. The very high one-oh's, but that's still cooler than the hundred-teens.
One cool place for escape is Rocky Mountain National Park, astride the continental divide in Colorado. I was there in late June 2003 and on the main road through the park, in the area around the continental divide (the road peaks at about 12,000 ft above sea level, I believe), not only was the snow still on the ground, the snow on the sides of the road (remnants from the road being plowed through the winter) was well over the height of the car (this was when I had an SUV), probably 10 to 12 feet high. That will cool you down.
This photo is from the descent on the western side of the continental divide, homeward bound. Still cool, however.
Today is the 10th birthday (according to vet records) of Norm The Dog.
Norm's been slowing down lately, but I'm guessing that is a function of high temperatures in the hundred-teens, morning temps in the 90's, and evening temps in the one-hundred-oh's, rather than being related to the number of times he's circled the sun. Is today really his birthday? Or, when he went to the vet for the first time with his second owners back on August 21, 2011, did the vet say, "He looks about one year old" and that became his "official" vet records birthday? I report. You decide.
I've been posting "cool" pictures the last few days, photos of cool places as we muddle through an extreme heat wave here in Las Vegas. This certainly qualifies as a "cool" photo, albeit a different kind of cool.
And what better place to go for cool times in cool places than the land of ice and fire: Iceland.
This is Gullfoss, a large waterfall on Iceland's "Golden Circle" of tourist meccas, which, in addition to Gullfoss, includes the geysers of Haukadalur, including the large geyser named Geysir (our word "geyser" is probably the only English language word derived from Icelandic, as we borrowed the Icelandic word and changed one vowel -- prior to the discovery of Yellowstone, the English language really didn't need its own word for "geyser"), Thingvallir (rock formations along the tectonic plates, spelled in Icelandic with that weird letter that looks like a bullet, and one of the major stops on the global "Game of Thrones" tourism tour), and the Bobby Fischer Museum in Selfoss. OK, I added that last one to the "Golden Circle," but it really is part of a circle with the other three and is, in my opinion, well worth a visit if you find yourself in Iceland.
You may recognize Gullfoss as the place where they shot the cover photo for the Echo & The Bunnymen LP "Porcupine." No? Understandable. No one should ever buy an Echo & The Bunnymen album. They have some incredible awesome fantastic singles, such as "Bring On The Dancing Horses," or "The Cutter," or, especially, the amazing "The Killing Moon," but a whole album? No. Stick with one single per LP and you will have all the Echo and all the Bunnymen that one person would ever need.
Getting back to Gullfoss, this is from my visit in June 2016. While the heatwave here will dissipate tomorrow, high temperatures will remain in the upper 100-oh's through all of next week. So more escapist "cool photo" fun is in the future.
The heat wave is still on. This will be another day with the day-time high well into the hundred and teens (that's 45 degrees for you people in Celsius countries) (which, yes, I know, is everywhere except the United States and Myanmar).
So let's go where it was cooler. One such place was the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in the northern Czech Republic. I visited in May 2019 and the temperatures were in the 40s (high single digits for those you in Celsius countries) (any friends in Myanmar would have known what I was talking about with the Celsius translation).
The Adršpach-Teplice Rocks are a collection of interesting and tall rock formations. Between the location in northern Europe, and the height of the rock formations preventing much sunlight from reaching the ground, this place is likely cool even in summer heat. And the rock formations are cool in addition to being cool.
It is going to be a whole week of high temperatures in the 100-and-teens, so time to remember good times in cool places. I had the chance to visit Olympic National Park on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State back in 2001. I attended a convention in Seattle and, afterwards, headed to Vancouver Island and, right before returning to Las Vegas, Olympic National Park.
It's Washington, so of course there's going to be wood.
I spent five days in Quito, Ecuador, right as everything was starting to shutdown for the COVID-19 pandemic panic. That was five months ago and, after all that is happened in the Year of Our COVID 2020, it seems like it was several years ago, not a few months ago.
This is Plaza Argentina on the north side of Quito, just above the Mariscal district where there were a lot of nice hotels and great restaurants aimed at the foreign tourists. Locals call the Mariscal neighborhood "Gringolandia" because this is where you see us Gringos in our natural habitat, spending 24 to 48 hours in the City of Quito before embarking on journeys to the more touristed parts of Ecuador, which almost always included the Galapagos.
I was in Quito, weirdly enough, to see Quito. That's not typical. Typical is using Quito as the transfer point because your international flight landed at Quito's airport in the middle of the night and you have time to kill before you head on to the tourist meccas elsewhere in this beautiful country.
No I do not know what that big wooden sculpture in the plaza is. I asked some locals. They didn't know either. I guess it will forever be one of those mysterious secrets of South America that will not be surrendered.
The Chapel of the Holy Cross is a Catholic Church located on the outskirts of Sedona, Arizona. I am using the term "outskirts" generously, as it is not really near much of anything (except acres and acres of red rock). But it is a functioning Catholic Church.
For the longest time, I thought this church building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's not. It's about as Frank Lloyd Wright as the Empire State Building. Or last night's bowl of pasta bolognese, for that matter. The architect was local gal Marguerite Brunswig Staude. She was inspired by ... not by any Frank Lloyd Wright designs ... but by ... wait for it ... the Empire State Building. Personally, I don't see the resemblance, but I'm not an architecture professional. She first tried to build a church of this design in Budapest, Hungary, with the assistance of ... wait for it ... FLW's son Lloyd Wright. Plans were abandoned because of this thing called World War II. You know, the one with Hitler.
That's too tenuous of a connection to Frank Lloyd Wright to have been the basis for my thought that this is a Frank Lloyd Wright work. Why I thought so is just a mystery. One of the joyful mysteries. It's not really one of the sorrowful mysteries.
Monument Valley, on Navajo tribal land in the Arizona corner of the Four Corners region, was used as the backdrop for a number of movie and TV westerns. Some of those were in the black & white era. And that means the Phot-o' the Day is Monument Valley in awesome artsy black & white.
Visited April 1998.
Monument Valley, in the Arizona section of the Four Corners region, is one of the iconic sights of the American Southwest. Its name comes from the fact that so many large rock formation jut straight up like a bunch of tombstones.
There are no hiking trails here -- there is no shade, there are no "facilities," there is no water -- so take in the majesty of the park you drive. The roads within the park -- one of the "main" ones is in the foreground -- are not paved, but the land is so dry and the ground is so hard that it really is the same as if you were driving on asphalt, but without the distracting ribbons of black asphalt detracting from the terra cotta red of the rocks. I guess that's why so many "new model" automobile photo shoots were done here. It definitely would explain why this used to be a filming location for the old Hollywood westerns of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and, really, up until the time that the mountains of Italy and western Spain would play the part of the Desert Southwestern USA in those hipster spaghetti and gazpacho westerns of the 1960s.
Visited April 1998.
It was Joshua Tree National Monument when I took this photo (with real camera film!) in 1994. It's since been upgraded to national park status. But the photo is of Joshua Tree in its national monument days,
Sort of like if you had taken a photograph back in the 1500's of that large city on the Bosporus in Turkey. The photo would be of Constantinople not Istanbul, even though today that city is Istanbul not Constantinople. So this is Joshua Tree National Monument Not Joshua Tree National Park. Why did Joshua Tree National Monument get the works? That's nobody's business but the clerks.
South Park was right. French Canada is the best Canada.
This is a view of historic Old Quebec City, near the Plains of Abraham. You may remember the Plains of Abraham from the French & Indian War as the battlefield upon which the game of Stratego is fought. Yes, those red and blue lieutenants, sergeants, miners, and flags from the Stratego game were here in Quebec City. But not in any of those buildings, including that awesome signature building of downtown Quebec City in the upper left of the photo.
There is a long (and growing) list of places I've been where I've not spent nearly enough time. Quebec City, PQ, is definitely one of those. Historic and beautiful architecture. Great food. And a funicular. The three essential ingredients that make any place worth visiting.
I believe I visited in the Summer of 1995. I could be off by one year in either direction, but it definitely was in the final years of the second millennium.
El Panteón Nacional de los Héroes, the National Pantheon of Heroes, in Asunción, Paraguay. Many Paraguayan national heroes are honored and interred inside.
I visited Asunción in late 1997, just when Paraguay was emerging from the isolation and military dictatorships that had been its station since independence in the early 19th Century. Things might have changed over the last two decades, but the only person in all of Asunción I encountered who spoke English was the day shift front desk clerk at my hotel. But it was OK. I went to Paraguay specifically because I wanted to go somewhere no one else I knew went to. Twenty-three years later, I still think I'm the only one I know (in the sense of whether any of us truly knows one's self) who has been to Paraguay.
And I loved it.
This is the facade and main entrance of Igreja e Convento de São Francisco, the Church and Monastery of St. Francis of Assisi, in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Brazil. The church is just as amazingly beautiful inside as it is outside.
Salvador is a wonderful city. It is the center of Afro-Brazilian culture. (It is probably the best place in the western hemisphere to experience African culture, period.) It has the best music and the best food in Brazil. Basically, it is a Portuguese-speaking version of New Orleans, only with miles and miles of the beautiful beaches.
Visited December 1997. For years, I had wanted to spend Christmas on a beach in Brazil. In 1997, I did. In Salvador.
Somewhere in a field, not far from the town of Alliance in the high plains of Western Nebraska, is one of the most amazing, awe-inspiring, roadside attractions in all of the Americas: Carhenge.
