My style of leisure travel is to walk everywhere I can. I see more of the destination, get a better ground-level feel for the place, benefit from the exercise, and save $$. Boston, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris: all big cities where if there were a map of my cumulative walks over the years, they’d be painted red. Those maps would fail to capture the fact that I’d have my backpack and maybe even a roller board suitcase in tow.

I probably pulled this shit with Jessica a few times, politely tolerated at first during the honeymoon phase, before she ended it. Permanently. I want to say it was at the Copenhagen train station, walking a few blocks to our hotel with 2 young children and all our luggage. Fair enough I suppose.

Harry doesn’t know any better than to just go with it. (Or, gawd help him, he’s like me!) I’ll take that as the best ever father’s day present. We slept 2 hours max on our red eye flight to Keflavik Sunday morning, then stayed awake walking around town, no napping, until 10pm. On Monday after a 12 hour sleep, we hiked our luggage over to the domestic airport, Harry pushing his suitcase up the hills. When he stumbled, and I went back to check on him, he had a grin on his face. “I’m just not used to the gravity here yet.”

We’ll be back to Reykjavik in a week.  Onward!

Harry and I are headed out on an adventure tonight. We’re excited!

For the last 3 years both Harry and Felicity have been going to overnight camp in Brevard, NC. Shout out to Gwynn Valley, a place we dearly love and will miss! But this year Felicity will be attending a dance intensive instead. So Harry asked if he could go camping with me rather than going alone to camp. Hell yeah!

We spun the globe and landed fingers on a place that was conveniently close, yet still dramatically remote: Greenland. And it turns out you can only get there via Iceland or Denmark. We’ve already enjoyed Denmark (other than Harry’s forehead vs. Tivoli Gardens gravity boat deck), so Iceland it is! And we may as well explore Iceland, too, while we’re there anyway…

The title of this post may seem addressed to myself. Getting off a plane and exploring a new place with my son will be the ultimate Father’s Day gift to myself. But the truth is, I’m addressing this post to my father, and dedicating this whole section of the blog to him. Dad was supposed to join us on this trip, but he suffered a freak Pickleball injury that sidelined him for the season. I wanted the trip to be his father’s day present, but instead a blog will have to do.

This blog is a combination of adventure trekking and photography, two things Dad instilled in me. (Was it nature or nurture? Do I have instinctual wanderlust, or did I learn it from watching him?)

Dad put a series of 35mm cameras with B&W film into my hands from a very young age. I learned the hard way such things as not swapping half-exposed rolls of film (gotta have the right ISO for this bright beach day!) in a “dark” corner of our station wagon. We developed film and made prints in his basement dark room. It was hours of intimate time spent together on weekends in the dark or dim red light. But first we needed to take the photos!

If you’ve seen a photo of me on a hike laden with camera body, multiple lenses, and tripod, just realize this is an extrapolation of my youth. With camera, canteen, and often binoculars strapped around my neck, Dad would take me hiking. He even dragged his large format camera (think old-timey with black curtain draped over the operator) around to get shots of landscapes or of me in the landscapes. We hiked to a place we called The Moon, which was the big water tank in Natick Town Forest. Great memories!!

Here’s to you, Dad. We’re thinking of you as we embark on this adventure, and hope you heal up before our next! 😘