Heipei

The post with details about our 2014 US East Coast vacation will take some more time, I’m still busy uploading the best photos to flickr in small batches.

There was is one photo that stands out though, and I knew it was special the second I took it. This was when we were leaving the Adirondack Park (New York) towards the Canadian border. It was the height of the Indian Summer, with lots of people stopping on the shoulders to take photos of the foliage. We had stayed in Lake Placid and stopped a few times while still in the park on our way out. One of those places was Saranac Lake, where there is a small parking lot next to a boat landing site. So I took the photo below and did not have to edit it one bit. I posted it to flickr (and a few flickr groups), and lo and behold, it quickly got a lot of views. It got so many views that it was featured on flickr explore, an automated list of the 500 most popular photos on flickr for each day, woohoo.

As you might have guessed by watching my flickr feed in the last few days, Katrin and I had a vacation on the US East Coast this year. I’ll do a post about our time there once I’m done uploading all of the photos, for now just the link to flickr.

Katrin and I went to Konstanz for a weekend in early September. Konstanz is located at the Bodensee, and it was our first time there. It’s worth a visit, but after two days you’ve definitely seen everything. You can view a few of my shots on flickr.

I’m still busy editing the shots from our recent vacation which we spent on the US East Coast. But we also managed to sneak in a long weekend in Paris this year. Like the last time around, these three days in Paris were magical, and I don’t think we’ll ever get tired of visiting.

Surprisingly, this time was completely different than when we went there two years ago. Last time it was August, most of the Parisiens apparently had left the city in a mass exodus during the summer vacation in France. This time, unintentionally, we went to Paris in June, and got to see a completely different side of the capital. Where we had been alone before, wandering the streets, taking in the city, we were now sorrounded by scores of people. Not just tourists, but most of the time by Parisiens.

Since we didn’t anticipate the big difference between June and August, we had decided to go with an apartment “downtown” this time, two blocks from the Louvre. This by itself certainly had it perks (and was affordable too, thanks to AirBNB), but since we took our trusty old Volvo (much cheaper than the train, sadly), we actually had to drive straight through the nightmare that is downtown Paris during rush hour.

I’ll leave the rest of this post for the wonderful photos I managed to capture. Interestingly, we didn’t see or do many things which we hadn’t already seen before, but just revisiting the same Quartiers and streets was worth our stay. The only thing we definitely did this time was to go up on the Arc de Triomphe, something we didn’t know was possible last time around.