The Traveling Widower

Tag: travel

  • Two Years Changes Everything

    January 13th, 2026

    I’d normally post this in the journal section of my site, but I am traveling, sitting at a bar in a hotel, so I figured this belongs on the travel blog. Spoiler alert – it’s not exactly a happy post.

    It’s amazing how much can change in a couple of years. This day, two years ago, my wife was struggling with both short and long term memory as the tumor continued to destroy her brain. But she worked so hard at being able to wish me a happy birthday that morning when I woke up. It meant a lot to both of us. Birthdays were always something we celebrated, usually with a good dinner and strange birthday cards. That evening, we had our usual celebration at our favorite restaurant (Southfork), and we shared the usual gigantic ice cream pie…she even ate a good chunk of it. It was a good day.

    So today was the first where I’ve reached that unfortunate point in life, when most of the birthday wishes I get are e-mails from health care and travel companies, and from a few close friends. Please – I’m not complaining to my friends, since I did not go around telling everyone what my birth date is. No expectations there. It’s just that my parents, in-laws, brother and wife have all passed, so there is really nobody left to celebrate with. Welcome to old age.

    But, today I’m in Santa Cruz, and spent the morning photographing Elephant Seals at Ano Nuevo State Park. I’m sitting in the hotel bar, eating a pretty good burger, a vodka martini that someone else payed for, and now a nice glass of Cabernet (Daou).  Last evening, I had dinner with friends I have not seen in a long time, and talked a lot about my travels and of course, Jan. These were all good friends of hers. Tomorrow I’ll be back with the Elephant Seals, and plan to cruise around some other places on the coast, and then have dinner with a friend. Thursday I’ll spend time with another good friend of ours who I have not seen in a while, and then head back home. So it’s turning into a nice, short trip. But much like Christmas, from now on, this is a day I’m just going to ignore. There is just not much to celebrate anymore.

    Life goes on.

  • 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….