The adventures and various works of a photographer, road tripper, former patron of the local arts, aspiring app developer, and late night coffee drinker and conversationalist.
I'm an informal collector of vintage and antique photo snapshots and slides. Professionally taken pictures of course have their own particular charm and value, but when I'm perusing antique malls and estate sales, it's the vintage stuff I'm on the lookout for. My tastes trend heavily toward depictions of places I have visited, historical oddities and one of a kind items, children/families, local history, and the occasional random, heartwarming or otherwise eye pleasing snapshot. I pick these up wherever I find them, whether at the aforementioned antique malls and estate sales, online listings, or anywhere else they happen to cross my path.
Here I present a selection of items from my vintage photo collection, all of which depict locations I've visited during my various road trips across the United States and Canada. They are accompanied by some of my own photos of the same or similar locations.
Grand Canyon, 1922
I visited the Grand Canyon's North Rim in October of 2021. The writing on one of my pair of antique photos identifies the views as having been recorded to film in June 1922, some 99 years prior to my visit.
Grand Canyon, June 1922
Continue reading "Scenes from my vintage photo collection"
Documenting thirteen years' worth of big road trips is a challenge at any time, but it's all the more so when you're trying to do it long after the fact. If by some chance you happened to visit this site before the 2021 revamp (and you had the appropriate direct links), you would have been able to see travelogs for 2012, 2013, and 2014 on some very simple webpages. These were thrown together while I was actually on the road using a laptop and motel room wifi, and were intended to cover highlights of each trip for people back home. I stopped doing these in 2015 due to the excessive time I was spending going through all the material and putting it together every few days while on the road - during my supposed vacation, I would rather do something else. But when home and not running around North America, collecting all my big road adventures together in detail on the site has been a long time coming.
This is a listing of recommended lodgings in various cities across the United States and Canada, based on my own personal experiences. This is most definitely not a listing of every motel or other property I have ever stayed in, and I am also leaving out certain properties that I have stayed in multiple times as they are not necessarily places I would recommend to other travelers (some are borderline dives or in borderline seedy areas, for instance). When booking a place to stay, my main considerations are cost, convenience, cleanliness, and the area the property is in - amenities such as free breakfasts, gyms, laundry facilities, in suite coffee makers, and room service are not priorities of mine. The goal is always to find as inexpensive a room as possible while not ending up in a dive or in an area where I don't want to go outside at night.
Continue reading "Places I have stayed during my travels across North America"
Documenting thirteen years' worth of big road trips is a challenge at any time, but it's all the more so when you're trying to do it long after the fact. If by some chance you happened to visit this site before the 2021 revamp (and you had the appropriate direct links), you would have been able to see travelogs for 2012, 2013, and 2014 on some very simple webpages. These were thrown together while I was actually on the road using a laptop and motel room wifi, and were intended to cover highlights of each trip for people back home. I stopped doing these in 2015 due to the excessive time I was spending going through all the material and putting it together every few days while on the road - during my supposed vacation, I would rather do something else. But when home and not running around North America, collecting all my big road adventures together in detail on the site has been a long time coming.
