Woke up early-ish in our hotel in Florence, had what was probably the best breakfast of the trip (they had a pancake machine and real maple syrup), and took a city bus down to the Florence train station, Santa Maria Novella. We purchased tickets from a nice lady and had just enough time to grab some food before our train left for Rome. I want to say it was about two hours on the train, just sort of sinking into our jetlag and exhaustion. It was going to be a long day.
The first thing we did was stash our larger bags. Sophie and I both had packed relatively light for two weeks away from home, just a carry on and personal item (camera bag for me, backpack for her). But lugging even that much luggage around the city seemed like a real pain, and there are plenty of luggage storage spots that’ll hang onto your bags for a small fee right by the train station. Once that was stashed, we set off walking.
The original plan was to walk quite a long way, to try to stay awake as long as possible. We sat down at a cafe in Rome and got some espressos, and immediately felt tired. The coffee picture was taken at 6am California time, or about 2pm in rome. Our flight out of Fiumicino was later, like 8pm, so we had time to see a few things. We ventured inside a church that had us go through a metal detector that didn’t care at all about my cameras; I was hauling the whole kit, since I didn’t want to leave the real valuables in a luggage storage spot of unknown provenance. They didn’t seem to care or even want to look in my bag when it made the thing beep. I must’ve looked pretty harmless or very jet lagged or both.
Inside the church, there were a lot of incredible works of art, just amazing, and not a ton of light. This wasn’t one of the big main churches, just one that was sort of in our path. There is an unbelievable amount of wealth in rome, just centuries of the church paying for people to make cool shit and then gild it with gold from faraway lands.
After the church, we walked another 20ish minutes, slowly, to the Colosseum. It’s possible we could’ve ridden the metro and been there in just a few minutes, but remember, time to kill (on checking, now, I think the metro station may have been under construction? hard to say for sure). So we walked through a pretty scruffy park and there were other ruins, less famous, fenced off there. It came into view from kind of the top of a hill. Lots of tourists, huge line to get it, so we decided, at least for this trip, to just walk around. It was super hot anyway.
Walking around, about 3/4 of the way, both myself and Sophie hit a wall, and just sat in the shade for a minute drinking water. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor and majority rules, we hopped a taxi back to the train station. The taxi driver dropped us off a couple blocks from the station because from the direction of the Colosseum the traffic was kind of impossible. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck, because we sat down at the first pasta joint we saw and ordered what looked good, plus a beer for me and a wine for Sophie, just for safety. And the food was really good, like pretty much every other meal we had while we were in Italy. Seriously, they export their tomatoes, but they keep the best stuff for domestic consumption.
Then, back into the train station, tickets on the Leonardo Express to Fiumicino. I think we both dozed a bit on the train, and then while we were in the airport, I lost my hat shuffling things in my bag. We bought a bottle of champs in the terminal so we’d have something for breakfast, and I had to put it in my bigger bag, which had my hat; after that point, the hat was not seen. RIP cubs hat with the neon logo. Anyway, our flight was on time for a change, so we left Rome at around 9 and landed in Olbia around 10. Someone Sophie knew on from the festival group on Facebook gave us a ride from there to San Teodoro, where the festival was held. Finally got to our airbnb around 11 and crashed pretty hard.
Next: festival and probably finally review the tiny camera…
Posted on 2022-10-28T07:20:33Z GMT
So, after Point Reyes and my birthday on Tuesday, I basically did laundry and started packing again, this time for two weeks away in Italy. A for-real vacation for the first time in a while. Two years? Maybe three? 2020 we went to Colorado in the fall, but that was a working trip, where we were just isolated somewhere else and doing our jobs remotely. I don’t recall a vacation in 2021. NYC in 2019 might be the last one? Anyway. New camera came wednesday of that week, and I have some thoughts, which I’m gonna share at a later date. It came on the trip.
We went to the airport mid-afternoon, for a 7something departure, SFO to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Florence, where we were stopping overnight. I’m sure Frankfurt is a lovely town, but Florence is a short train ride from Rome, and for some reason the tickets were cheaper (and our hotel, too). It made a sort of sense when we were planning, anyway.
I really do love the international terminal’s departures hall. Just a big airy space. People going somewhere, people coming from somewhere. Also, I never knew that SFO has an out-of-doors patio at the far end of the G terminal, but it was right by our gate, so we took the opportunity to get a couple last breaths of fresh air and sunlight.
Anyway, we boarded and were delayed, but finally took off. I sat there, reading for quite a while, and then I looked out the window and noticed some odd lights: it took me a moment to realize, in my sleep-deprived state, that it was the Aurora. I’d never seen it in person before. Of course, I only had the tiny camera, and didn’t yet know how to lock it to infinity, so the resulting pictures are even blurrier than they would be normally. Still, it’s something.
Arrived in Frankfurt, got our passports stamped for entry into the EU, and ran for our flight to Florence, only to see that it too was delayed, and then it was delayed again. Finally, we boarded, flew another hour, and landed at sunset in Florence (beautiful, but through a dirty window; the pictures look like they were taken with vaseline on the lens). Wandered out to find the Taxi stand and the queue, waited another 30 minutes, and got to our hotel just in time to get dinner.
Then the next day, we had breakfast and set off for a day in Rome. Next time!
Posted on 2022-10-25T08:29:53Z GMT
This was summer 2021, after everyone got vaccinated but before Delta came and took away our hopes and dreams. Drink and Draw is a little get together for creative folks to be creative in an easygoing space. I haven’t been in a while, but the format is probably the same now; they’re announced on insta @drinkndraw.elis.
Anyway, at the start, everybody throws out a prompt, and someone makes a list of all of them. Then you just sit there and chat and draw the prompts and have drinks and food and sometimes there’s a dog. I’m a terrible draw-er but it’s still fun to see what people come up with, to figure out interesting ways to interpret the prompts, and just have fun being creative with folks.
Pausing on the recent for a little bit while I live with the next photos off the queue from my month-ish of travel. It’s nice to get a little distance from the photos. At least, that’s what I tell myself to justify a year+ of backlog that I haven’t posted. Also, I feel like the next post is going to be somewhat camera-reviewy, which makes me cringe reading it back to myself. but I spent a long time agonizing over this new camera, and really ended up liking it, and I think there are things about it not covered in the endless algorithm optimized reviews that are already out there. So, a review.
Oh, look at the time, seems I’m all out of words. Go read Tony’s blog, he’s better at words anyway.
Posted on 2022-10-11T07:34:45Z GMT
So we set out from James and Janelle’s, heading due west on back roads. Pretty quickly we were in the middle of nowhere, practically. North of Petaluma and west of 101 is ranch and wine country. Lots of big hills that don’t quite make mountains. We got to the 1 at Tomales, and followed it south.
There are a half dozen little towns you pass through on the way down the eastern side of Tomales Bay; little places that may have once subsisted on fishing industry, but now seem to exist mostly for people to visit. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a gem of a little bay, and the rolling hills make for an excellent drive, even on the sunday of a big holiday weekend. The traffic wasn’t bad, but there were a lot of tourists hitting the open restaurants.
For no particular reason (OK, a very peculiar one unrelated to anything here), I’ve been thinking about dowsing the last couple of days. You know, the thing where someone gets a forked stick, or sometimes two bent wires, and they walk around and find where to dig for a well. You might be thinking, “Surely that must be fake, and there’s no way hard-headed Matt believes in such nonsense,” but you’d be wrong. You see, I have the knack for dowsing myself.
I don’t remember how it started. I think we’d seen some show on the history channel about it, and the person in the show had used bent wires, L shaped, one in each hand, with the long part of the L being maybe 18” and sticking out in front. My dad said, yeah, some folk have the knack and some don’t. Your Great Uncle Shorty, (or some other relative, I don’t recall) he could dowse.” Well, one of us realized we had a surplus of wire coat hangers and pliers.
Next thing we knew, all three of us were out in the back yard pacing around. The first time the wires crossed in my hand ( and every time after, too) it felt as though some force was pushing on them, and there was no way for me to stop them. We had well water, despite living in a house in the middle of a suburb of 35,000; the house predated the development of the area by a few years. The wires would always cross when I walked over where the pipes fed from the wellhouse to the house proper. Eyes closed, eyes open. Weird, inexplicable, not terribly useful skill, in the days of ground penetrating radar and sonar and whatnot.
I tell that story because it feels a little bit like the process of making pictures for me. Like there’s this inexplicable force between me and the image. Sometimes I go out with my camera (bend coat hanger rods) and look for the pictures (the water) and can’t find it, other times it’s there and I can’t stop it. There are a lot of easy explanations that flatten an essentially inexplicable experience; if you try to examine it too closely it disappears.
I’ve talked recently about good days shooting, and this is kind of like that. I think what I was talking about in that post was a kind of mastery, of getting the thing right. A dowser day, a day like this sunday afternoon, is more like something rolling down the hill. It’s a thing that happens as a side effect of pointing the camera at stuff and pushing the button. “In the moment of aiming, the [camera] turns like a dowser’s wand” (to steal a paraphrase from Tom Waits) and even though it feels like you haven’t done anything, the pictures happen.
OK, enough blather. I probably should have tried for a tighter edit; maybe one less boat? I had so many of that long beach that I cut, and other images of pretty much everything you see here. This edit started out at like 40 pictures. Anyway. Next: Matt goes to Europe and reviews a camera (maybe).
Posted on 2022-10-05T06:01:12Z GMT
Most of september, I lived out of my suitcase. Labor day weekend, I was flying back from Denver. I had been there at a conference, technically in Aurora. The night before had been a late one; there was an open bar that had Laphoriag, and it only takes a couple (three?) these days to give me a wicked hangover. But that’s not what this is about, nor is it about the 3am Mcd’s I may have had. I managed to get up in the morning and get myself together, get to the airport. By the time I got through security, I’d drank a liter of water and one of gatorade, and I was feeling somewhat human.
Of course, that meant that as soon as we got to cruising altitude, I was asleep. Turns out that was a good thing, lots of clouds over the Rockies, not a ton to see. I woke up as we were passing over the eastern sierra, snapped a pic of the fires over Yosemite, and tried to wake up to march through the airport.
Somehow, I either took a wrong turn or something, but my plane went to terminal 1, and I ended up walking all the way to the exit in Terminal 2. Maybe I was still a bit hungover. At least I only had carry-on luggage; I walked out the door and Sophie pulled up about two minutes later, and we were off. I had kinda thought I’d go home, maybe take a shower and grab some clean clothes, but things were already in motion, and there wasn’t time.
Sophie drove straight from the airport north, across the bridge and onto the 101. I don’t remember the town name, but we were headed somewhere in Marin, where our friends James and Janelle have a place with a pool. Cason and Ryan were already there, having a good time and texting us, telling us to hurry.
I feel like I got there, cracked a beer, and hopped in the pool, but there was probably more to it than that. They definitely showed us around the place. It was dark, when we got there, but it was also still like 80º. This was one of the last really hot weekends, so the water was fine. I was able to run laundry, shower, and fall asleep in a nice warm bed.
Sunday, we went to the grocery store and got some essentials, burgers and chips and that sort of thing. Just sort of had a lazy day most of the morning, besides the grocery run. James grilled the burgers for a late lunch, just a perfect Labor Day weekend. Then, I’d decided ahead of time that I wanted to go shoot pictures around sunset in Point Reyes, because it was my birthday weekend. So we took the car and headed west, in that direction. But those photos will be in the next post.
Posted on 2022-10-02T07:22:18Z GMT
