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Journals and photos from my travels around the world.
It’s my ten year anniversary of reaching Machu Picchu after an arduous four-day hike of the Inca Trail through rain, sleet, and altitude sickness. Despite my tribulations, the journey and the destination were more than worth it. It’s an experience I will never forget.
My traveling has been on hold since the pandemic—I hope to get back to it again someday soon. In the meantime, here are my journals from the entire Peru trip, culminating in my arrival at Machu Picchu.
The Peru Journals:
I’m finally getting around to sharing travel photos again after a long layoff—(the instagram fiasco soured me on photo sharing for a while and in the interim I switched my attention to writing prose again)—but I’m back.
First up: Prince Edward Island. We only allotted two days to spend here but it ended up being one of our favorite legs of the trip. We stayed on the less-touristy northeast side of the island at a charming place on a cliff overlooking the sea called the Johnson Shore Inn. The view from our room was spectacular. The entire visit was relaxing and serene, and during our walks it felt like we had the entire island to ourselves. I only wish we could have spent more time here.
This collection includes shots from the inn and our hikes along the shore and the cliffs, as well as a couple of shots from our visit to the Souris Historic Lighthouse.
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This collection compiles the photos I shot while walking around San Francisco at night. Fishermans Wharf and Pier 39 feature prominently, along with some photos of various buildings.
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Here are some animals I encountered during my hikes in Glacier National Park. I was particularly thrilled that I was able to see a bighorn sheep in the wild on my way back down from Grinnell Glacier.
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This is a collection of panorama and HDR photos from Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks, as well as Cedar Breaks National Monument. The vast majority of these were not originally shot as panorama or HDR, but were converted from separate photos that I felt looked better merged together. The two that were actually shot as HDR/panorama are captioned as “True Panorama” or “True HDR.”
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View More Southern Utah Photos View More Bryce Canyon Photos
View More Zion Photos View More North Rim Grand Canyon Photos
Cedar Breaks National Monument was my second stop on the way to Zion from Bryce Canyon (after previously stopping for a brief hike in Red Canyon). The drive involved a pleasant detour along a scenic country road in which I was frequently the only car on the highway. I didn’t have time to do a big hike here but I walked around the rim for a bit. It has a similar feel to Bryce Canyon (in fact, a couple of times while I was sorting photos from the trip I accidentally put Cedar Breaks shots in with the Bryce pics).
Overall, I wouldn’t say it’s a must-see if you’ve been to Bryce, but if you have the time, it’s a nice diversion with beautiful views along the rim at nearly two miles above sea level (so even in warm months you may need a light jacket).
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In the middle of our long drive from Halifax to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, we stopped at The Ovens, a beautiful coastal national park featuring a hiking trail along a series of sea caves. We then had a nice early dinner at a little German restaurant on the side of the road before heading into the cute seaside town of Lunenburg for a walk. Lunenburg is another of those towns that made me fall in love with the Canadian Maritimes and fantasize about moving there.
Fans of Locke and Key may recognize both The Ovens and Lunenberg as filming locations for the series, though our visit was long before the show aired. I seem to have a habit of visiting places before a TV show begins filming there–years ago I visited both Split and Dubrovnik in Croatia before Game of Thrones had begun filming in those cities.
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On my way out of Yosemite National Park I stopped for a hike through the Mariposa grove of giant sequoias (aka redwoods). They don’t grow as tall as the coastal redwoods, but they grow wider–some are so massive that their branches actually look like trees themselves. It’s impossible for any photo to do these behemoths justice, but the people in some of the shots below, and the fact that many of the large surrounding trees look like sticks next to the redwoods, help to provide a sense of scale.
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This is a collection of panoramas from my visit to Glacier National Park. For the most part I didn’t take any deliberate panorama shots on this trip–these were all stitched together from separate photos that I later realized would make good panoramas. The exceptions are the two night shots, which were sort of deliberate in that I aimed the camera in the dark at different angles for long exposures and hoped for the best (the Lake McDonald one, in particular, turned out pretty well).
The first four photos below feature views from the hotels where I stayed in Apgar Village and Many Glacier; the next three were taken during my hikes of the Highline and Grinnell Glacier trails, and the final photo is a view that should be familiar to fans of The Shining or Big Sky.
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This final batch of photos from my visit to Bryce Canyon National Park consists of shots from the other leg of the Navajo Loop Trail, where I partially descended for a view of the famous Thor’s Hammer rock formation before climbing back up and starting my full descent into the canyon down the Wall Street leg. Additionally, there are photos from my walk along the Rim Trail between Sunrise and Sunset points.
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Michael Rappa 