Every year around our anniversary (and sometimes in between), we head down to the southern tip of New Jersey for a stay in the lovely shore town of Cape May. We’ve been coming here regularly for over a decade now, to the point where we’ve come to think of it as our second home (I know the roads almost as well as if I were a resident). With nice beaches (including areas to take the dog on the bay side), beautiful Victorian homes, great restaurants, a charming pedestrian mall, and tree-lined streets, it feels like a small town that just happens to be on the beach rather than a town designed to be a beach resort like the other major shore destinations in the area.
If you stay in the northern end of town (as we usually do), with its neighborhoods full of well-spaced houses and green lawns, you can almost forget that you’re even at the beach. But you’re close enough to Wildwood that if you’re itching to spend a night on the boardwalk (and indulge in my favorite pizza, Mack’s), it’s just a quick drive up the coast. We enjoy staying in Cape May during the offseason, particularly in September when we can watch the Monarch Butterfly migration. Unlike other shore resorts that basically become ghost towns after Labor Day, you can pretty much have the same experience in Cape May as you would in-season, only with fewer people. Our dream is to retire here.
There is so much to love about Cape May, but rather than describe it in words, I thought I’d just share some of my favorite photos taken over the last decade, starting with a few panoramas followed by a gallery of photos that vary in quality depending on the camera that was used. I know there are quite a few, but it’s hard to compress a decade’s worth of photos into one blog post. 🙂
Typical summer beach scene.Higbee BeachA view of some of the oceanfront properties.Overhead view of the main part of town.The canal that separates Cape May from North Cape May.The Main BeachSunset Beach featuring the iconic sunken concrete ship (which may not be visible much longer in light of how much it has sunk recently).
And here is the gallery. I had to keep the thumbnail images small so the page wouldn’t take too long to load, but you can click on any image to view a larger size.
Lately I’ve been messing around with HDR photography. Normally that involves merging multiple versions of the same photo taken at different exposures, but I’ve also read that you can create a pretty good approximation of an HDR photo from a single RAW image, so I figured I’d experiment with one of my older photos.
I thought the above photo of the Grand Canal in Venice was a good candidate given the contrast between the light and dark areas, so I used Adobe Camera Raw to create three different image files: the original photo, an underexposed version, and an overexposed version. When I merged them in Photoshop, the overexposed photo washed the image out too much, so I only ended up combining the normal and underexposed versions. I then applied a bit more processing to the final image.
I’m still very much a novice at this HDR stuff (and with photo processing in general) and I kind of rushed through it, so the results are not ideal, but I think the final version below is a decent first attempt at a pseudo-HDR photo. You can click on the photos to view larger versions.
Venice: The Grand Canal (HDR)
Like many HDR photos, this has a bit of a surreal feel to it, but with a little more time to tweak settings, I probably could have made it look more realistic.
On a side note, this photo was taken with my Panasonic FZ-40, a megazoom point-and-shoot. I am considering upgrading to a DSLR and have been eyeing the Nikon D3100 or D5200. If any photographers out there have any advice about these (or other cameras), I’d love to hear from you. Although I’m never going to be a professional, I feel that I may be outgrowing the limitations of my megazoom, particularly its performance in low light.
Update:
Just minutes after posting this to my blog, I saw a deal on eBay for a refurb Nikon D5100 with a kit lens at a price that was just too good to pass up. I normally steer clear of refurbs but the company, Adorama, seems to have a good reputation among the photography community, so I pulled the trigger.
So it’s official, I’m a DSLR guy! Now, to shop for some accessories and a good all-purpose zoom lens…
This installment covers Days 19–20 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
After our relaxing stay in Basel it was time to resume our trip. We hopped on the train in Basel at 9:30 a.m. for a roughly 15-hour ride that would take us through Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and finally into Zagreb, Croatia. That’s a long time to be cooped up in a train, but on the plus side, our Eurail passes afforded us first-class seats for most of the trip, so the ride was more comfortable than the trains we had ridden in Italy.
And the scenery was breathtaking. If you like riding trains, I highly recommend taking one through Switzerland and Austria—I can’t imagine a more picturesque journey. Here are some photos from that part of the trip. The quality is poor because they were taken with a cell phone through the glass window of a moving train, but it gives you some sense of the beauty of the countryside through this part of Europe.
We arrived at the last stop in Austria late in the evening. The next train would take us into Slovenia and Croatia. The station was a bit creepy, tiny and isolated. Huge, long-haired guards were patrolling the grounds. They did not look like the kind of people you wanted to cross.
The layover was fairly long and we were starving. We had been on the road since the early morning without really having a meal. The only available food in the station was the finger food being served by a casino/bar, so we decided that we would wait and eat in the dinner car on the train. This turned out to be a mistake because the train to Croatia was basically equivalent to an old commuter train, so there was no dinner car, not even someone walking around serving snacks. Alas, we would not be eating until we reached Zagreb.
Riding through Slovenia at night was an interesting experience. It’s hard to put into words but it had a different feel than riding through Western Europe. I kind of felt like I was traveling behind the old Iron Curtain or something. When we reached Croatia we had a bit of a scare around 11 p.m. when Croatian police boarded the train to check our passports. One officer looked at my uncle’s passport for the longest time, and then began asking us questions about where we had come from and why we had no entry stamp.
I explained that customs never stamped our passports when we landed in France. He replied, “They must! They must! That is why we have stamps.” I thought we were going to have a problem but he finally said, “It’s not your fault,” and stamped our passports. So word to the wise: when you land in a foreign country, make sure you get your passport stamped.
We finally arrived in Zagreb around 11:30 that night. It was obviously too late to go out for dinner so I settled for a sandwich being sold by a shop in the train station. Fortunately, the hotel was right across the street from the station, so we didn’t have far to walk. We didn’t do much unpacking since we would only be here one more night, so I gobbled up my sandwich, went online for a bit, and then straight to bed.
We spent the entire following day walking around the city. It was the only day we would have to check out Zagreb on this trip so we tried to make the most of it. We didn’t have any planned excursions; we just meandered and soaked in the sites. I noticed right away that more people spoke English in Croatia than they did in Italy, so I wasn’t at all hindered by my failure to learn any of the Croatian language before the trip. In fact, I don’t think I encountered one person in Croatia that didn’t speak English, a much different experience than in Italy, where the tiny bit of Italian I picked up before the trip came in very handy.
For lunch we had some good doeners (a Middle Eastern/European dish similar to a gyro) at a little café. Later on we snacked on some tasty fritule, which are like fried donut holes or zeppoles. Uncle Kipp had his with powdered sugar while I opted for cinnamon (I never turn down a chance to have something with cinnamon). Later that evening we had an excellent dinner at a cute restaurant called Hansel & Gretel that featured a rustic, fairy-tale décor. I don’t recall exactly what I had, but I remember that it was a very rich and creamy dish, and quite delicious.
Here are a few photos from our day in Zagreb:
We didn’t stay out too late because we had to be up early the next morning for our train ride down to Split, which will be covered in the next installment.
Zagreb was a hopping city, kind of like Croatia’s version of New York. It’s a shame we didn’t have more time to take in all it had to offer, but who knows–maybe I’ll see it again.
This installment covers Days 16–18 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
After our final night in the villa we awoke, finished packing, and walked up the road to the bus stop. We had time before the bus was due to arrive so we entered the nearby restaurant to have lunch, where we bumped into three of our villa-mates. They had left the villa earlier in the week but returned to the area on this day to have one last lunch at the restaurant and say goodbye to the waitress they had befriended. We were very fortunate to have run into them because our bus arrived early and never stopped. We exited the restaurant just in time to see it speeding down the hill.
If our villa-mates had not been there we would have been screwed. The next bus wasn’t coming anytime soon and we would definitely have missed our train to Basel. Luckily, they had a car and were able to drive us down the hill and into Florence, all the way to the train station.
So we hopped aboard the train for the long ride to Switzerland. We had one layover in the very busy Milan train station before getting on the final train to Basel. As is always the case when riding through Switzerland, the scenery was gorgeous. Here’s one photo I took from the train that didn’t come out too badly (most of them had window reflections):
We arrived in Basel late that afternoon. Uncle Kipp’s friend Andy met us at the train station and guided us via public transportation back to her apartment. We would be spending the next three nights here before heading to Croatia. At the apartment we met the rest of her family, including her mother, who cooked us a delicious Tex-Mex dinner. Before dinner I had my first ever glass of Prosecco—and a love affair was born that continues to this day. It’s so inexpensive over there that Andy had an entire fridge stocked with it. After dinner I tried my first roasted chestnut, which was a big deal for me because I don’t like any kind of nuts in general, but I was able to enjoy these.
Before bed that night I skyped with my wife, Jen. I had chatted with her on the phone throughout the first 16 days of the trip, and of course I missed her the whole time, but it wasn’t until seeing her and my dog, Heidi, on video that I truly began feeling homesick—and I still had two weeks to go. We had been apart for 8 to 9 days on my previous trips, but a month is a long time. For the most part I was okay because I was always so busy during the day, but at night it would catch up with me a bit.
After breakfast the next morning we went for a walk all over the city. Unlike Lucerne, Basel is not nestled in the Alps, but it still has plenty of its own charm, and the Rhine is never far away. There was a fall festival going on that reminded me of the carnivals we have in the States. While walking though the festival we rode the large Ferris wheel, which provided us with spectacular views of the city when we reached the top.
For this post I decided to try a photo gallery for the first time, so here is a collection of some of my favorite photos from Basel. The fall foliage lent a beautiful color palette to the city. You can click on a photo to view a larger version and a description:
That night after dinner we watched some TV before heading to bed. The next day, we went into France for lunch. Basel is so close to both France and Germany that a trip to one of these countries is akin to hopping in a car in New Jersey and heading to Philly or New York. This was my first visit to France, not counting the Paris airport, so I could now say that I had set foot in the country, even if it was just over the border. We had a nice lunch at a Japanese restaurant—that’s right, we went to France to eat Japanese. 🙂
After lunch we went to a mall, which was near a McDonald’s. I was very tempted to get my Pulp Fiction on and go order a “Royale with Cheese.” Anyway, that night I skyped with Jen again before bed. It was Halloween, but they don’t really seem to celebrate it in Switzerland, so it was basically just a normal night.
Overall, we had a nice, relaxing three days in Basel. I am very grateful to Andy and her family for welcoming us into their home and for everything they did for us. It was a much-needed escape from hotel living that allowed us to recharge our batteries before embarking on the second half of our trip, which would begin the following morning with an early (and long) day of riding trains that would take us through Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and finally into Zagreb, Croatia. That part of our journey will be covered in the next installment. Until then…
This installment covers Days 14–15 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
At the end of our two-night, ill-fated Cinque Terre stay, we checked out of our hotel early to catch the bus that would take us into La Spezia for the train ride back to Florence. The bus was very late and for a while we thought we had missed it or were in the wrong location. Finally it came and we hopped aboard for a long ride into the city. After arriving we walked down to the harbor in the hope that we might be able to take a boat ride so I could get a closer look at the four Cinque Terre villages that I hadn’t been able to visit, but everything was either grounded or tied up in rescue operations. So we headed to a café for breakfast to kill time until our train left.
On the way back to Florence our train had a stopover in Pisa, so I decided to go see the Leaning Tower. Uncle Kipp had already seen it, so he stayed behind at the train station. It wasn’t a long layover so I had to hustle down to the Piazza dei Miracoli (where the tower is located), which was roughly a 30-minute walk across the River Arno.
River Arno in Pisa
I made it to the square and had just enough time to walk around the grounds, but unfortunately not enough time to tour any of the buildings or climb the tower, so I had to settle for taking some photos.
The Tower
The hardest part about shooting the tower is resisting the urge to tilt the camera and straighten the tower out.
Church and TowerI love the colors of this walkway.
Rather than share the clichéd photo of myself holding up the tower, I thought I’d share a photo of other people doing their holding-up-the-tower poses:
After taking my photos I rushed back to the train station and we caught the train back to Florence. Before heading back to the villa we did some grocery shopping so I could make dinner the following afternoon. I bought supplies to make pasta with pancetta and braciole. We also picked up more of that awesome Italian prosciutto to snack on that evening–if prosciutto tasted like this in the States I’d buy it all the time.
So we hopped on the bus to take us back up into the hills and to our villa. Unfortunately, we had caught the wrong one—it only went about halfway up and then came back down again to pick up more passengers and then make the drive all the way up the hill, so we wound up riding it twice before finally making it back to the villa.
When we entered the house we discovered that everyone else in our group had already left, so we would be spending the next two nights in the sprawling villa all by ourselves. Walking the long halls and stairways of the 100-year-old building at night with nobody else around was decidedly spooky.
One of the hallways. The only things missing were some ghostly twins and Danny Torrance riding his big wheel.
It didn’t help that a waitress at the local restaurant told us that the villa was supposedly haunted, or that we had just recently been discussing The Shining. In fact, one night while I was sleeping I thought I heard footsteps around my bed. I’m sure I was just dreaming, but it still creeped me out. 🙂
Here are a few of the interior shots I took to try and capture a bit of that creepiness:
The next day, I decided to stay behind at the villa while Uncle Kipp went into Florence. I needed a day to relax after everything we had crammed into the last two weeks. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, as if we were in the middle of the summer rather than the end of October. I walked around the outside of the villa and took some more pictures of the grounds and the beautiful countryside.
The caretaker’s house next to our villa.View from my room over the top of the gazebo.A zoomed in shot of Florence viewed from the hills near our villa.Outside the VillaTuscan countryside viewed from the villa’s gazebo.Another view of the Tuscan countryside from the gazebo.
That evening I started to make dinner, only to discover that there was no more garlic in the house. We didn’t think to buy any because there had been a lot left the last time we checked. Oh well, I forged ahead, though the lack of garlic made for some pretty bland braciole.
Uncle Kipp returned from his day out, during which he also took care of paying the final bill. To our shock, we got slapped with a heating bill of 800 Euros! The nights were cold and it was a huge building with lots of people requiring different levels of heat to stay comfortable, but we were still stunned. It didn’t help that there was a broken window in one of the rooms that we had to force closed with a rock that the landlords never fixed during our two-week stay. They also failed us in other ways (including shutting off the heat and hot water on our last night) but I don’t want this post to turn into a laundry list of complaints. Suffice it to say that they received a lengthy letter after we returned home.
That night I walked around outside taking some more photos. Here is one of Florence.
Florence at Night
I watched some TV before heading to bed. The Cinque Terre disaster dominated the news channels. The only English-language channel was showing Jersey Shore. Ugh, I hope that’s not how the rest of the world thinks the average American behaves. 😐
The next morning we awoke early so we could close up the villa and head to the bus for our long journey to Switzerland and the beginning of the second half of our trip, which will be covered in the next installment. In the meantime…
This video is a tour of the grounds surrounding the villa I lived in for two weeks outside of Florence, Italy in 2011. You may have already seen this if you read Part 1 of my Eurotrip journal, though the video is now much smoother thanks to youtube’s smoothing software (with the minor side effect of wacky looking text at the beginning).
The villa was over 100 years old and full of character. The view of the Tuscan countryside from the gazebo was sublime: the hills, the olive groves, the other villas; very peaceful. And on the other end of the grounds I could see Florence in the valley below—an amazing view at night. It’s not difficult to understand why someone would decide to drop everything and move to Tuscany; it’s such an easy place to fall in love with.
I took this photo in November of 2011 during the Croatia leg of my epic monthlong trip to Europe. This is the dock outside of Krka National Park where a riverboat drops you off for a visit following a 30-minute ride down the Krka River from a nearby town. The park is home to some spectacular waterfalls, including the one featured in the panorama at the top of this blog.
After our tour of the park, I arrived at the dock about fifteen minutes early to wait for the boat. I was the only person on the dock so it felt like I had the entire river to myself (a major advantage to being in Europe in November is the lack of crowds). I snapped this photo and then lay down on the dock just staring out at the river accompanied by nothing but the sounds of nature. It was such a peaceful setting; I could practically envision myself as a character in a Mark Twain novel.
This installment of my travel journal covers Days 11–13 of my 2011 trip to Europe…
After a long, long break, I am finally returning to the journal of my 2011 trip to Europe. When we last left off, I had just spent two days in Venice, my first ever solo trip in a foreign country. Upon returning to Florence from Venice, I caught the bus back up to the villa, arriving in the early evening, but I was stuck outside the gate for about 15 minutes unsuccessfully trying to get the non-English-speaking caretaker to let me in. There were only a limited number of gate keys, I did not have one of them, and nobody else from our group was home. I thought I was going to be stuck outside for the next few hours until somebody else came back (that’ll teach me to not learn enough of the local language when I travel).
I sat outside the gate with all of my luggage trying to call my uncle (in between curses) to see if he could contact somebody to get the caretaker to let me in. Before the call went through, the caretaker finally realized I wasn’t a criminal and the gate opened at last. I went inside and enjoyed a couple hours of peace and quiet before the rest of the group started filing in. Once again, however, I would not have much time to rest as I needed to pack for a long train ride to Cinque Terre the next morning.
By the time the train was making the final approach to La Spezia, where we would catch a cab to our hotel, it was already dark. At one point we were confused and got off the train at the wrong stop in a remote area. Something didn’t look right, however, and we jumped back on just before the train left. I can’t recall definitively, but I think that may have been the last train of the night, so if we had missed it, we would have been screwed.
We were checking in a day late because we got our dates wrong, but the hotel was kind enough to move our reservation back a day without penalty. As it turned out, missing our check-in date was the best thing that could have happened because Cinque Terre was ravaged by terrible flooding on the day we were supposed to be there (you may have read about this in the news). It had been raining heavily during the train ride in, but it did not seem extraordinary and we thought nothing of it until we learned of the devastation the next day.
We checked in to our hotel, located high on a cliff outside of the five connected villages that make up Cinque Terre. We had a long climb down the cliff to get to our room (a good fifteen minutes), hauling heavy luggage in the pouring rain. When we finally got down to where the rooms were situated, we walked around and around but could not find our room. We finally gave up, soaking wet and tired from a daylong train ride as well as the climb down. I left Uncle Kipp with the luggage and I ran all the way back up the cliff to the hotel office to ask them how to find our room. We finally found it, nestled in this little blink-and-you-miss-it nook area that was easy to bypass in the dark.
The room was a little skeevy, but I was tired enough that I didn’t care. If nothing else, we had a great view overlooking the Mediterranean when stepping outside of our room.
The view from outside our hotel room (the next day).
There were no other restaurants in the area because of the middle-of-nowhere location of our hotel, so we went to the hotel restaurant (which meant climbing all the way to the top of the cliff again). I had spaghetti Bolognese with boar meat; it didn’t really taste much different than other types of meat, especially when drowned in pasta sauce. After dinner there was really nothing to do but turn in since it was already pretty late and we were so far outside of the villages.
The next morning we awoke early with the intention of hiking the trail that winds its way among the cliffs and through the five villages—only to discover that the trail was closed. This was when we learned about the massive flooding that had devastated the area and rendered most of the villages inaccessible.
A highly zoomed-in shot of one of the villages we could not reach, possibly Monterosso.
In fact, the only village we were able to access was the first one, Riomaggiore, and that involved about an hour of walking down the main highway and through a dark automobile tunnel.
The end of the tunnel we walked through.Approaching Riomaggiore
We walked around for a bit when we got there, making our way down to the little harbor, but we didn’t stay very long because there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do with so much being closed down.
Riomaggiore
We were bummed that the whole trip out to the coast seemed to be for nothing, but when we later learned of the sheer level of the devastation, we realized how lucky we were to have accidentally checked in a day late. We almost definitely would have been right in the middle of one of the villages when the flooding and mudslides began, needing to be evacuated like so many others, and it could have been even worse—nine people lost their lives.
When we got back to the hotel my uncle spoke to a Spanish couple who had been stuck inside their car in one of the villages during the flooding for hours, thinking that they were going to die. They were eventually evacuated by chopper and ended up at our hotel, but their car and everything in it was lost.
An evacuation chopper.
It was unbelievable to hear stories like this because the previous night’s storm hadn’t seemed like anything out of the ordinary, but the images we would later see on television were shocking. We were truly fortunate to have missed it, just as we had missed the rioting in Rome by one day earlier in the trip.
A capsized boat apparently washed out to sea by the flooding.
It was still fairly early in the afternoon when we got back to the hotel so I decided to hike down a nearby cliff. There was a trail that led all the way down to the beach. My uncle stayed behind so I went by myself.
Part of the trail (more treacherous than it looks).
For late October the weather was as warm as mid-summer, so I was able to wear shorts. There were beautiful views of the Mediterranean on the way down.
View from the trail looking north.View from the trail looking south.
I also passed by a couple of houses that looked like they had no business being in the middle of a cliff.
One of the houses along the trail.
Along the way, there were some interesting sights, such as this red ant-infested rock that I could easily have leaned against if I hadn’t been paying attention:
Them!
However, it was much farther to the bottom than it had appeared when I started, so I only made it about two-thirds of the way down when the sun set.
The setting sun.
I found a place to sit and admire the sunset over the sea. I was the only person on the trail so it felt as if I had the entire Italian coastline to myself. I was amazed at how peaceful the Mediterranean appeared, almost motionless.
Mediterranean Sunset
I climbed down for a while longer but I never made it to the bottom. I didn’t want to hike back up the cliff by myself in the dark, and I was already pretty tired anyway, so I turned back. I made it back to the top by around eight in the evening. That night we had dinner at the hotel again. I ordered shrimp and was very surprised to be served a plate with fully-formed shrimp staring back at me, eyeballs and all. They don’t serve them that way in the states. 🙂
We turned in shortly after dinner. We had to wake up early the next morning to catch a bus into La Spezia, where we would hop on a train back to Florence and the final two days of the Italy leg of our trip, which will be covered in the next installment. Until then…
This is another one of those afterthought photos that turned out pretty well. I was on a tour that included the salt mines of Maras and the Inca ruins at Moray, which I wrote about in the second chapter of my Peru travel journal.
On our way back from Moray the bus drove through the village of Maras, a town comprised primarily of old colonial buildings, most of which are still in use. We didn’t have time to explore the village since it was only a half-day tour, but when the bus briefly stopped I stuck my camera out the window and quickly snapped this photo so I would have at least one clean shot of some of the buildings. In the process I captured this local woman sitting in the shade, away from the heat of the sun.
I have just booked my next big trip: a tour of Aztec and Mayan pyramids in Mexico that starts in Mexico City, moves to the Yucatan Peninsula, and eventually ends up in Cancun. I am also timing the trip so that I will be in Mexico City and Merida during the Day of the Dead festivities, which should be a neat experience.
This will be my first completely solo trip, which I now feel comfortable doing after my partially solo trip to Peru last year and my two days alone in Venice in 2011. I decided to treat myself to the deluxe tour package so I should be staying in some pretty nice hotels–my reward to myself after four days of roughing it in the wilderness of the Inca Trail last year. 🙂
Below is the rough itinerary according to the tour company’s web site. I don’t think I’ll have a ton of free time, but if anyone who has traveled to that part of Mexico has any suggestions about things to do, places to eat, etc., I’d love to hear about your experiences.
Day 01:
Arrival in Mexico City. Free time.
Day 02:
All-day sightseeing tour in Mexico City.
Day 03:
Visit the Guadalupe shrine.
Guided tour of Teotihuacan pyramids with free time allotted for climbing.
Day 04:
Fly to Merida.
Short sightseeing tour in the afternoon.
Day 05:
Visit the Kabah and Uxmal pyramid sites.
Day 06:
Visit the Chichen Itza pyramid site.
Transfer to Cancun.
Days 07 and 08:
Free time in Cancun.
Day 09:
Depart for home.
Sounds like a nice tour. The Aztec and Mayan pyramids have always been near the top of my bucket list. I can’t wait!
I have just booked my next big trip: a tour of Aztec and Mayan pyramids in Mexico that starts in Mexico City, moves to the Yucatan Peninsula, and eventually ends up in Cancun. I am also timing the trip so that I will be in Mexico City and Merida during the Day of the Dead festivities, which should be a neat experience.
Michael Rappa 