400 miles, 4 states, 182 photos:
The images in the video are all from my trip from Pennsylvania to Virginia to visit my brother, by way of Shenandoah National Park. With this in-car camera rig, I used a radio remote to trigger the shutter when there was an interesting scene. Post-production was done in Aperture, Quicktime, and iMovie HD.
John Fielder remarked that the best time for photos is often when normal people would like to be eating dinner, so if you want the shot, pack a sandwich along with your camera. Catching this sunset at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia proved this to be pretty good advice!
I arrived in the park later than planned, which left me just enough time to make camp before driving to the trail head. Dinner was in the car - a turkey sandwich from the camp store. With the light waning, I double-timed it up the trail to the summit of Stony Man, and was rewarded with a great view, beautiful colors, and a nice collection of rocks and small pools in the foreground. After a few hours of shooting the changing scene, I donned a headlight and hiked back down in the dark, relieved that the glowing eyes in the forest were just deer and rabbits, not bears!
I always enjoyed camping growing up; a chance to be outside, see the stars, and skip showering for a few days. As an adult, it’s become tougher to forgo a soft bed, but this summer has shown me the fun side of it again.
With less money to spend on travel, camping offers a great bargain - especially if you can borrow gear from family and friends! (That tent is older than I am.) As for comfort, they key is throwing out all the catalogs of slick but uncomfortable backpacking gear and embracing the excess of car camping: an Aerobed and extension cord do wonders to change your perspective on sleeping outdoors!
Beyond the money, there’s the experience: being in the park, sunrise to sunset. That means catching great photos, seeing more wildlife, and being able to take advantage of more ranger programs.
Three weeks in southeast Asia exploring new places with camera in hand made for some great photos. In this post, I’ll elaborate on the gear, shooting, and processing of travel photos from halfway around the world.
To understand one of the problems with health care in the US, see if you can answer the following questions:
Those simple questions are often difficult to answer because there’s little information or transparency when it comes to health care costs. Employers often don’t disclose the majority share of the premiums they pay, and after your copay most costs occur behind the convoluted curtain of the insurance industry.
When I booked my flights for Asia, I decided to treat the 12-hour layover in Seoul, South Korea on the way back as an opprotunity. After all, how many times do you connect through a city you’d love to explore, let alone one halfway around the world?
The little bit of research I did revealed that there was a tourist information desk at the airport that was a good resource. My overnight flight from Vietnam arrived before they opened, so I had a chance to grab breakfast and brush my teeth before the very helpful (and English-speaking!) woman gave me some pointers.
Her suggestion: take the bus downtown, and ride and hop-on hop-off tourist bus circuit to over 2 dozen sites. It worked quite well; the downtown bus was a full coach with incredible legroom for the 1.5 hour trip from Incheon airport into downtown Seoul. The tourist bus was right there, and stops at several palaces, markets, and museums. And they even take care of you if you lose your ticket because your brain is only running at half power 
After a very entertaining Thai Cooking class, I was eager to compare it with Vietnamese cooking in Hoi An. Our guide Huy set up our group with a dinnertime class, which was nice it that it took care of dinner and left the day free for the beach and clothes shopping.
This class was “family style” at Gioan, where all of us sat around the table chopping ingredients and then cooked one batch together. Our teacher Vinam was very sweet and energetic; she gave us all vegetable names (I was “Lemongrass”) and jokingly threatened to put us in the corner if we didn’t pay attention. (I was too tired and sunburnt that night to go crazy with my camera, so I stayed in her good graces.)
The ingredients were similar to the Thai dishes, though with less intensive preparation. The one exception were some ingredients that had to be wrung out or juiced by the “big strong men”: Barn “Green Papaya”, Matt “Aubergine”, Chris “Cucumber”, and myself.
We learned how to roll and fry the spring rolls we’d been enjoying all week, as well as make a surprising green papaya salad, and fish wrapped in banana leaves. Vinam was flexible with all the recipes, making vegetarian substitutions for Jenn (”Baby Onion”), and suggesting less exotic ingredients we might be able to find at home.
With 5 dishes, several rounds of drinks, and an impromptu fashion show of some of our new clothes , it was a long but enjoyable night learning some new recipes.
Besides being a picturesque former trading town near the beach, Hoi An in Vietnam is known for its many tailors. You can’t go 50 feet without hitting a clothing shop, all of which can make just about anything you can dream up.
Many of us had been planning to get clothes made, and decided to make dinner quick our first night to get to the tailors. We didn’t even have to finish dinner; the small restaurant across from our hotel was next to a clothing shop, whose owner came over with her toddler to say hi and invite us in for a look. It might’ve been clever marketing, but their samples and fabrics looked good, and Matt & Anna reported similar findings at another nearby shop, so we had found our store!
That turned out to be the easy part, as their table was stacked with thick catalogs of styles, and the walls piled high with enough fabrics and silk to satisfy my mom and grandma! We had a fun scramble through catalog pages and fabric bolts, which was certainly more fun as a group. Jenn and Chris provided a good sounding board for my choices, and the final tally was astonishingly low for so many custom pieces.
One feature of this trip was an overnight train ride from Hue to Hanoi, which sounded a bit charming. Even if being bunked 4 to a cabin wasn’t Orient Express level luxury, I figured it would be on par with the 2 star hotels w’ve stayed in - simple but clean.
Instead, we got more worn, drab-green cabins whose only real charm was getting a good “roughing it” experience. After a beer or two to ease the jolt (a Gorillapod can be twisted into a cupholder, by the way), the stewards brought around schedule cards with pictures of much nicer cabins. Chris and Matt set out to find these mythical cabins, with clean, already made beds and walls paneled with fake wood instead of real grime. Having honed their negotiating skills after two weeks of beating down local hawkers, they came back with an offer to upgrade all 3 cabins for our group for half price, or about $8 a person. With 12 hours to go, we all jumped in and moved on up.
Outside of Ho Chi Minh City is the Cu Chi region, whose people fiercely defended their homeland during the Vietnam War (or American invasion as it’s often referred to here). As the old, black and white propaganda film explains, they responded to the “American demon’s” bombs and tanks by digging a complex network of tunnels to live, work, and fight from.
The region is dense jungle, crawling with centipedes and snails and quite loud once the other biomass starts talking. It’s tough to imagine finding or fighting anyone here, even without the tunnels. With tunnels, traps, and bombs everywhere, victory seems impossibile.
A tunnel entrance, invisible under a covering of leaves, is a tiny 18 x 10 inches - just enough to admit a skinny person’s torso with their arms held up. A few of us dropped in with headlamps and began a doubled-over duck walk through tunnels no more than 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. After the first bend, all outside light and air disappears and the heat and claustrophobia hit me quickly. Then it feels like a urgent scramble to get out, and looking at the surface distance our crawl through the tunnel seems much longer.
The remainder of the tour shows - above ground - how the villagers prepared weapons and nasty spiked traps, made sandals from tires (which lasted for 5 years), and fed themselves with rice paper and rice wine. Craters from the many B-52 delivered bombs dot the landscape, and it one a formidable bundle of bamboo has grown dead center. The most striking part of the experience was crawling through the tunnels, though - it took some very tough people to live and fight in them for weeks at a time.
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