East to West

from east to west……
the red maple leaf is particularly appropo!

draw and shoot

Tomorrow, the first of July, we celebrate Canada Day and I was thinking about how fortunate I have been to recently travel to both the east and west coasts. It’s an expansive, diverse, and beautiful country, and I am grateful to live here.

Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians, and if you live south of the border, happy Fourth of July!

Boundary Bay, British Columbia





A silky Cape Breton sky.

Cape Breton bog flora. Below: Pitcher plants



All images © Karen McRae

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Pamukkale

adjacent to Hieropolis and the Roman baths…the ancients loved their thermals

Third Country

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Exploring Oregon’s Coast

Oceanside, Oregon

“Thar Be Whales!”, Pacific City

Dory Cove, Pacific City, Oregon

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A couple of the towns on Oregon’s west coast are Pacific City and Oceanside. Both are small and secluded, a bit further from the standard paths to Lincoln City and Cannon Beach to the north and south on Highway 101. But they are worth the journey. Both have beautiful volcanic “haystack” rocks jutting out of the sea, providing viewpoints and shape to the landscapes. Oceanside often has hang gliders sailing off from one of its rocky headlands, and vacation homes dot the steep hillside adjacent to the flat sandy beach. Pacific City is much smaller, but its restaurant Pelican Pub, is directly on the beach. It is one of the few beaches from which boats can be launched from shore, the old time wooden fishing dories from which the town’s cove is named. Surfers can also occasionally find waves here big enough to ride, but one thing you will always find, is that wave riders have to wear wetsuits because the Oregon waters are cold!

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Oregon: the Undiscovered Country

Oregon is a unique state. It’s beauty has gotten a bum rap, nationally speaking. Portland, it’s most cosmopolitan city, known for being “stuck” in the Pacific Northwest, the part of the US between better known Seattle, to the north in Washington state, and the better known San Francisco and Los Angeles and Yosemite, to the south in California. But Oregon boasts a number of qualities and terrains that these other states don’t. We have beautiful Mt. Hood, just an hour to the east of Portland, full of pine forests and wild rivers with much to explore and hike. Many find the rolling hills, farms and wine country, of the central valleys, very similar to the terrain in England. To the east, Oregon’s high desert plateaus illustrate vulcanism similar to Craters of the Moon in Idaho, which is also better known. Our section of coastline on the Pacific waterfront, is one of the most accessible, being miles and miles of flat sandy beaches unbroken by private ownership. But stuck between two better known states, it seems much of Oregon is still “Undiscovered Country.”

Here is just a glimpse of a couple of vistas of our beautiful coastline. California may have a nice pier at Santa Barbara. And Malibu is better known because Joni Mitchell sang songs about it’s beach. But Oregon’s coastal vistas are just as beautiful if not popularized on TV and radio. Certainly we don’t have the same traffic jams, or access fees! In our state, visiting the beach is still free.

Cascade Head, Lincoln City

Bandon Headland

Bandon beach

Gold Beach, Brookings

volcanic shoreline Gold Beach

Pacific Highway 101, Manzanita

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one fine day

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Passing Through London

Bank of London

Les Miserables in Soho

Selfredge shoppers cross traffic at Leicester Square

the mime gawks at onlookers. Leicester Square, London

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My images of London, circa 1999. Taken with a simple pinhole box panoramic camera, with elemental effects added later in Photoshop. Composing wide images like these, requires slightly different geometry than regular images, but I tried to make the most of each scene.

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Travel across the Roman Empire in real time with ORBIS | Ars Technica

In a clever bit of technological legerdemain, Stanford University has combined historical research, mapping, and Web technology to bring ancient Roman Empire travel to the Internet. A cross-disciplinary team has created and launched ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. With it, a user can determine how long it will take to travel from any point in the Roman Empire to any other, as well as calculate the cost of transporting goods and people.

This heretofore unnatural union of geographers, technologists, and historians of the ancient world is becoming more and more common under the descriptor of “digital humanities.” ORBIS looks to be one of the most effective examples of its promise.

Built by historian and classicist Walter Scheidel and Stanford Libraries’ digital humanities specialist Elijah Meeks, with the assistance of geographer and Web developer Karl Grossner and GIS analyst Noemi Alvarez, the interactive online atlas is based on a host of data. This includes historical tide information and weather; size, grade, and surface of roads; main cities and ports; land, sea, and river routes; vehicle speed (including ships, ox carts, horse, and walking); and the cost of transport…

continue reading Travel across the Roman Empire in real time with ORBIS | Ars Technica.

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lovely place to visit!

backyardprovence

The beach in Bandol

Bike Rentals on L’Ile de Porquerolles

Grazing sheep in Gemenos

The Port at Sanary-sur-Mer

The hills above La Roquebrussanne

Purple flowers in full bloom in Sanary-sur-Mer

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Cultural Immersion & Heritage In Iceland & Iceland – Finding Your Inner Viking | Away.com

At the time, I had no knowledge of the rotten eggs, the nose-pinching, the strange places Icelanders take automobiles, nor many of the other quaint and, frankly, weird passions of the Icelandic people, and I just thought Einar was a bit odd. At the time, I didn’t realize eccentricity was a national characteristic. Nor that it was contagious.
I started wondering about the Icelandic temperament when Einar Gustavsson advised me to eat trout smoked in burning horse manure. As a tourism official whose job is to convince Americans to visit Iceland, he did not tell me about the rotten duck eggs, or “hard-fish.” But he couldn’t restrain himself on the subject of the smoked fish.

“This is so good, you wouldn’t believe how natural and wonderful it is,” he told me on the phone.
“Horse shit,” I said, to be sure.

“Some horse manure, some wood,” he said appeasingly. “Mostly wood.”

Such was my introduction to Iceland, a Pennsylvania-sized island formed by a giant attack of planetary dyspepsia, and inhabited by the boisterous-yet-bookish descendants of the Vikings.

Although videos are making inroads, Icelanders are reputed to read more books than anyone else on the planet. They have always been wordy folk. Even when their young democracy wobbled out of control, leading to horrible poverty that lasted from the 12th century through the 19th, Icelanders held the touchstone of their language. Through the winter nights, they huddled in damp, turf-and-stone huts, reading the sagas aloud. In the worst of times, brought by Danish exploitation and vomiting ash that smothered the grass and starved the livestock, they ate their beautifully illustrated calfskin books, and went back to telling the sagas from memory.

This linguistic tenacity has paid a peculiar dividend: The Icelandic language has hardly changed in a thousand years, meaning that Icelanders can still read their ancient literature. These days, to protect the historic tongue from the epidemic of Global Culture Fade, a panel of Icelanders is charged with inventing new terms as needed. The telephone, for example, is a simi, or “thread.” A fax is a simibref, or “phone letter.”

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Cultural Immersion & Heritage In Iceland & Iceland – Finding Your Inner Viking | Away.com.

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What a wonderful day in the life of Elena Levon!

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