Travel
- Photos on my phone: 10,017
- Days away from home: 354
- Flight hours: 87
- Airbnbs and hotel rooms: 52
- Flights: 50
- Airports: 23
- Cars (rented/borrowed/owned): 17
- Countries: 10
- Boats: 3
- Children: 2
- Eurostars: 1
- MacBooks that survived a glass of whisky being spilt on them: 0
- Brown hairs left on my head: -6
- Flighty Friends - Connect with family and friends once, then you can see each other trips and get alerts — automatically and ongoing. You’ll see them on your map, can choose alerts levels, and can stop sharing anytime.
- Group Trip Ready - Your flights and friend’s flights appear together in the new Today view. Everyone’s live ETA and status make group trips easy.
- Friends Names in Flight Alerts - Now with name, photo, and custom controls per person to avoid notification fatigue.
- Trip Sharing - Send multiple flights at once. Receivers can add them to Flighty, or simply view them in their browser.
- Whose Flight is That? - See who’s on each flight in your flight list, on the map, and including their seat number if you’re sharing a plane.
Pretty cool to see my work at Balandra Beach in Mexico on Conde Nast’s Traveler today.
One day I ought to figure out how to be a professional profitable photographer instead of being an Unsplash dude.
Still have found what I'm looking for 🌵 Joshua Tree
When we were living in Baja California Sur a real hippy-looking bloke told me that the reason we felt so calm and at home in Baja was because it was a blue zone.
Wikipedia says of the evidence-poor but good-vibes terminology:
A blue zone is a region in the world where people are claimed to have exceptionally long lives beyond the age of 80 due to a lifestyle combining physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole-foods diet, and low disease incidence.
I feel the same way in Joshua Tree which is why we came back this weekend after taking Luna to Disneyland and before flying home to Australia.
You might even take away from the name of this blog that I don’t mind the album either.
Disneyland for Luna’s 6th birthday. What an amazing sensory overload. A work of art!
Well, that was Swell
I made the 4am alarm to catch the 2024 Swell Sculpture Festival before sunrise this morning and as always it was a treat. Something that stood out to me, and I don’t know if it was new this year, but much of the art was priced. Some of the sculptures were on the way to $100,000! If you can create art and put a price on it, and earn that price, then you’re doing a thousand times better than I who simply places his art on Unsplash and Pexels in lieu of doing the hard work of making art that people want, putting a price on it that represents value and effort, and putting it to market. More power to the artists who can exchange their art for good money, society will be better off for it. These are the pieces that captured me, one in particular was interesting, the “Personal Space Elevator”.
A transport nerd's Italian journies
I’m a transport nerd, so here’s my transport journey to and across Italy over the last few weeks.
Missing in my photos is my phat electric bike from Procida.
We scooted in Rome
Moped in Amalfi
Avis gave me what was pretty much a sports car in Sicily
Then a baby little Fiat 500X in Tuscany
I flew my airline crush in Ryanair
Qatar A380s from Australia and through Doha to Rome
And the best €60 I spent was on a business class seat on the high speed rail from Naples
Why are the Vatican guards dressed like clowns?
Orrrr why are clowns dressed like Vatican guards?
Some frames I have a captured on the Amalfi coast this week
Pictures of steak I ate in Florence
A little life update: we handed the keys for our Gold Coast home back to the landlord yesterday. Today we’re home-less. I’ve just boarded a flight to Melbourne for a wedding there this weekend, then we’re off to New Zealand for a week, the. Hobart and Sydney.
What I’m trying to say is don’t post me anything.
Drove the 90 minutes from Exmouth to photograph the sunset in Coral Bay this afternoon and also see the couple I’m marrying this weekend, and after the sun had set I found that all the local restaurants all had 90 minute waits, so I thought, I could just drive back to Exmouth for dinner.
Alas, everything in Exmouth was closed, not even a vending machine for a chocolate.
So I present to you my art from today, art quite literally made by a starving artist.
Also, regional Australia, let’s have at least one kitchen open past 8pm hey?
Luckily today is the first day back from holidays for The Short Order, so I was blessed to receive a 5:30am breaky burger for dinner.
Frames from Singapore
We’re packing and getting ready for our homeward journey tonight in Paris. We’ve got three flights left, and the longest ones just earned us a text message from Qantas letting us know that the four of us had been upgraded to business class (RIP my points balance). We’ve got a few nights in Singapore left and it’s back to the Southern Gold Coast after almost a year away.
So because I’m a big nerd, these are our family travel stats since we left home last September and listed our home on Airbnb:
I walked out of the house this morning and a man was urinating onto the street, facing in my direction, two metres away. I called out that he was disgusting and he stared at me in the eyes.
After riding a scooter across town to a store I walked upon a lady on the street bent over and attending to her monthly needs.
Just now walking to the grocery store I witnessed a man with both hands amputated smoking a cigarette, his two arms acting as two fingers.
The Parisians have really left their mark on me today.
After two months in London, across regional Austria, Liechtenstein, regional Italy, Puglia, and Tuscany, it is so refreshing for my soul to be walking the streets of Paris again tonight.
I could walk the streets of Paris and New York City for the rest of my days and never get bored or lose inspiration.
Driving from Siena, Italy, to Graz, Austria, today Goldie and I were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and we decided on this place named after a beach in Los Angeles.
I took Britt’s Fuji X-S10 with the 27mm f/2.8 for a play while we were there.
✈️ Flighty 3 is a private frequent flyers social network!
One of my most-used and favourite apps is Flighty, and they’ve just announced a new version that’s basically a frequent flyer’s private social network. I love it!
Flighty 3.0 is the new way to share your flying with family and friends. Keep track of your loved ones, not flight numbers. Another industry-first from Flighty.
Add me as a friend on Flighty, yo!
P.S.: Flighty is one of the very few iPhone apps I use on the regular which was quick to allow it’s app to be used on Apple silicon Macs, something more developers should consider enabling.
📷🇮🇹 Our last Monday in Puglia
A birds eye view of Martina Franca, in southern Puglia, where we’ve been hanging out this month.
In these photos, happening at the same time, is a funeral procession, a dance contest, and an opera, amongst whatever else the 49,000 residents are getting up to.
There’s also two 360 photos of Martina Franca in this embed, a higher and lower shot, look for the hotspots when you’re scrolling around.
📷🇮🇹🚁 Fifteen of Monopoli’s best from my Mavic in Puglia yesterday
