Note to Self: Travel

Travel Diary: Naples & Western Sicily

Note to Self — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:01:21 GMT

As I navigate the transition of my 17-year-old blog to Substack, I hope you enjoy the few archival posts I did bring with me, with some current tweaks for relevance. This trip was very meaningful to me. It came after the deaths of two family members, and being unceremoniously laid from a very high-stress job just after I bought my first house. Mentally,…

Travel Diary: South of France River Cruise

Note to Self — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:20:14 GMT

Bonsoir, mes amis. Oui, j’étudie le français avec Duolingo… it helped, a little bit.

Who doesn’t need a little vicarious travel right now? A full year-and-a-half after a trip? Or perhaps some pre-planning for places you may want to visit, or after the past couple months, relocate. I present to you: a recent trip to a very particular area in the south of France. This involved a (drumroll please) Viking River Cruise from Avignon to Lyon. Sort of… It became more off a bus trip due to the river being too high and rough to sail, but whatever. (They fully credited back the cruise, BTW.)

France is still France! Transportation and autonomy failures aside, it is always lovely. Were able to visit some of the scheduled stops from the original itinerary. Here’s the recap, and for fun, an informal assessment of whether or not I’d relocate there. Ha!

Arles

Home of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Romans, Arles is quite the charmer. Caesar himself visited, and built the cute little Roman arena that sits in the middle of the city. Though a high school gym class was there doing gladiator exercises, the modern use is mainly bull-fighting, and bull-jumping. It’s a whole thing apparently, and you’ll see nods to bull horns all over the city. Van Gogh even painted it.

Travel Diary: Bermuda

Note to Self — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:05:14 GMT

For the third year counting, I began the planning of my company’s Spring photo shoot by looking for a location that has a few distinct “looks,” and delivers on the annual fantasy of starting fresh. An ocean, sandy beaches, lush greenery, and interesting architecture are required, as is staying within our very scrappy budget. In 2023, we shot in Sarasota at The Ringling and Siesta Key. In 2024, we sweat through photographing Puerto Rico’s Old San Juan streets, grassy forts, and dramatic beaches. And in 2025, I picked Bermuda, where we traveled from one end of the island to the other, covering quite a bit of ground in between.

Here are the details…

View of the hotel beach as seen from our room block