The Traveling Widower

Category: Widower

All posts and pages related to being a widower, and in most cases, how this relates to travel

  • Small Changes

    January 23, 2026

    You may be wondering why I’m leading off with a picture of a beautiful fireplace (cough, gag). More on that later. This post has nothing to do with travel, does talk a little bit about photography, but is thankfully not one of those sad stories about grief that occasionally slip out from my journal. And it does reference life as a widower. Being one, it is hard to avoid the obvious. This particular topic is just the outcome of some work I’ve been doing around the house while I’m in between trips. Five weeks to go until I head off on my single engine plane ride to Guerrero Negro and the Grey Whales. GoPro videos of whale eyeballs will soon appear.  

    After I recovered from my endless plane ride home from Antarctica, and knew I was stuck at home for a few months, I started thinking about making a few changes in the house. Jan had wanted to get different bedroom furniture, and was tired of the art work we had in most of the rooms. I agreed of course – we both shared a minimalist view on decorating, and always agreed on whatever we bought for the house (and just about everything else come to think about it). I had ordered a new platform bed for Jan, but it arrived after she passed. My bad. Mea culpa. We had already started converting some of our framed photographs to acrylic prints, and had a few new ones made as well from some of our favorite photos. 

    These two were our favorites – both were taken when we were visiting friends who have a house in Capitola – Jan and I took a walk along the beach at low tide in the late afternoon,  with our friend and her mutant Golden Retriever. I love the shot of her and our friend walking back towards the village.

    I’ve met some widows/widowers who keep their homes as a memorial for their spouse, refusing to make any changes. I understand that, but that’s not my way. I posted an AI photo on FB the other day, of my house converted to a photo gallery.

    Obviously that’s not going to happen. For one thing, the HOA in Gold River will never allow that. Plus, I’d have to open up a gift shop. I do have some coffee mugs and t-shirts with my logo, but that’s just too much work, and I’m retired from all variations of that. 

    Sorry, once again, I’m getting off track.

    But, I am transforming the house into a gallery of sorts – I have so many great images from my trips this past year, and having these on the walls keeps my poor brain focused on recent, happier memories, instead of that ugly black hole that follows me around. That’s a good thing. So my office now has acrylic prints from Alaska, Antarctica and Zion National Park, along with existing prints from the Oregon coast. There will soon be one more of a big blue iceberg. 

    I also replaced a small watercolor in the niche in my lounge, with a large acrylic of one of my favorite hummingbird photos – you can get some amazing cropped photos with a 55MPS sensor.

    The most significant change I’ve made is in the living room (aka the parlor). There were a number of features of this house which we both disliked, aside from the fact that it was two stories –  electric heat (a heat pump), a pool, and laminate floors. Probably a few more things as well – we were desperate for a house. A long story, some other time.  OK…I’m off track again. This particular model of Powell Home had an absurdly small fireplace, in a brick wall. The functional wood burning fireplace was replaced by a useless electric thing which change colors to amuse their grandchildren. And then there was a blank, white, brick wall. We had thought about just ripping it down and starting over, or just covering it with tile, but that was too much work. After staring at it for a while, I figured just breaking up the vast whiteness with something horizontal might help. Like a mantel. Brilliant. The house we had built in Colorado had a beautiful, large fireplace, which came mantel-less. I ordered a 6’, unstained oak mantel, and managed to stain and install it by myself. This one was only 4’, and even with having to drill into bricks, was quite easy to install. Once complete, I was quite pleased with the results (the first photo). I have an acrylic print (see below) on order which will be mounted above the mantel, and will really finish off the room. The gnome will also stay – it fits so well with the decor.

    This room had been our hangout before Jan was diagnosed, but I’ve avoided it since she passed. The changes I’ve made sort of wiped the slate clean, and I’m now considering entertaining once again. I need to work on some other spaces now.

    I have one, very large open space in the entry way which is just screaming for a tryptic – that’s a large image, split into three separate prints.

    I have a few seascape/landscape images from Alaska and Antarctica in mind for that. I’m trying to avoid too many penguin photos….I have so many. It’s also risky filling the house with prints from my most recent trips, since I have six significant adventures coming up in 2026, and another five (so far) in 2027. I’m bound to have something interesting from Iceland, the Northern Lights, Patagonia, or a Kodiak Grizzly Bear devouring someone from my tour group. I’m going to Svalbard in 2027 – encounters with Polar Bears. So many options.

    Maybe I’ll just rotate what’s up on the walls. Or buy a second home on the coast with a lot of big, empty walls. It could happen.

    Peace.

  • Getting Organized (Finally) / Greatest Hits (Part I)

    December 10th, 2026

    I did not make any New Year’s resolutions this year, since I usually forget about them by the following morning. But, I do maintain a task list on Google Tasks of all the various financial, travel and general things I want to get done sometime in the future, which I actually do try to follow. One of those tasks has been to consolidate all my photo libraries and archives. As Jan’s dad always used to say, I need to get organized. So, with another full month at home before my next major trip, I’m spending a lot of hours on the iMac, trying to do the impossible – get organized. 

    First on the list was to go through all the images from the Antarctica trip – I finally made it through the initial culling process, and then marked ones worth curating, with the potential for printing and/or submitting for competition. That leaves me with 192 images to play with. A lot easier to deal with than the initial 3000 that I started with. By the time I get through the next review, using Adobe Lightroom to cull through the images, I’ll hopefully just have four or five dozen images at most to work with. Some of which I’ve already posted on the blog. 

    As for my storage and archive tasks, that’s going to take some time. I have one 4TB disk drive attached to the iMac which is my primary archive – I copy all the images from the camera SD cards to separate folders, one for each trip, and then work through each to cull out images I’ll never use. Unfortunately, I rarely get around to going through them all….until now. I also have two 4TB SD drives which I use for image archives – that’s a lot of terrabytes. So my plan now is to go through all the images from the past year, cull that down to a reasonable volume, and then copy those to the two archive drives. That should give me enough backups. And somewhere along the way, I intend to replace the disk drive with a large (8TB) SD drive, for my primary archive. 

    Phew…..that’s a lot of work.

    The final task I’m hoping to complete before I start accumulating more images, is to create separate folders for competition and print images, and a “Greatest Hits” folder. At the moment, I have copies of the images that I’ve used in competitions or in the blog, scattered across SD drives and in multiple folders on my iMac, iPad and Macbook. Time to centralize all of that, and then post the best-of-the-best on the blog.  Here is a first, partial pass on my greatest hits. Once I finish going through ALL of my images from the last year, I’ll do a separate post which includes these. I’ll probably have even more to post depending on when I get this review completed.

    I have started printing some of the curated photos, sending a few off to the two companies I use for glass/acrylic prints. We had started replacing the our framed photos with acrylics before Jan passed, and now I’m slowly filling open spaces into photo galleries. I don’t have a lot of open wall space – I might have to move. (No!)

    Greatest Hits From the Traveling Widower Part I

    This is a first pass – I’ll turn this into a new post, once I’ve completed my review.

    Alaska

    Baja (2025)

    Bryce Canyon

    Donner Tunnels

    Moss Landing

    Antarctica

    Whale Watch (2025)

    Zion

    Hummingbirds

    More to come….