A Weekend in Shenandoah

Some pictures from a weekend in Shenandoah last month courtesy of facebook.

Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and beyond

Pictures from a trip to Virginia Beach:

First Landing State Park.

The "knees" of the cypress trees that function to deliver oxygen to the tree

Hello Turtle

Military base lighthouses.

Here I am descending the stairs of the old Cape Henry lighthouse

This is the new Cape Henry lighthouse

Photos from around Virginia Beach

backbay wildlife refuge.

Colosseum

The Collesseum was amazing.

The Cats of Rome

There are homeless cats that roam the ruins of Rome. When I approached this one, it walked over to the wall and sat down with its back to me. Very strange cat behavior. The cats encountered in the gardens of Palatine Hill acted similarly.

Berlin

This is a palace near where my friend Hayley lives in Charlottenburg. Had such a good time with Hayley going to the various Christmas markets. We ended up walking around the palace grounds and when we'd gotten all the way around a caretaker told us that we weren't supposed to be in the gardens this late and we would have to walk all the way back around to get out (even though our exit point was a mere 20 feet from where we were standing and hadn't been closed yet!). So we walked all the way back around to the other gate which had just been shut by another caretaker. Hayley asked him (in German) if he could please let us out and thankfully he did. What a long, cold night it would have been had he not.

Hayley is an amazing violinist and is in Berlin to play with the orchestras there. Next time I visit her, hopefully I'll be able to catch one of her performances as I haven't been able to watch her play since we were little.

Manneken Pis

The peeing boy of Brussels was presented to us as "the Eiffel Tower of Brussels". These colorful guys are actually little replicas in a Belgian chocolate shop, but the actual boy is peeing into a fountain on a nondescript intersection of two nondescript streets. You'd totally miss it if you weren't looking for it, but luckily my friend was there to point it out to us.

Brussels was a really pretty city.

It rained for most of the time and by nightfall, the rain turned to snow.