“Douro Vineyards” — Vineyard-covered hills of the Douro River Valley near Pinhão, Portugal.
A highlight of our recent trip to Europe was a weeklong walk in the vineyard country of Portugal’s Douro River Valley. We started and ended in Pinhão, spending our days walking the hilly paths and dirt roads of the surrounding beautiful area. The timing was perfect — it was generally cool (with a bit of rain) and the vineyards and hills were spectacularly green.
I made this photograph on our final hiking day, as we made the short descent to Pinhão from Casal de Loivos, with its stunning views of the Douro River. After a week of walking, it was quite something to finish with a short (less than four miles) downhill walk through the beautiful vineyards.
”Porto Sunset” — The sun sets behond the Douro River, Porto.
We recently returned from a month and a half of travel, and it is time to start sharing photographs! We spent weeks in Portugal, including a 7-day walk in the hills of the Douro River Valley, then visited several new (to us) places in Spain before heading to Belgium. We concluded with a short stay in New York City on our way back to California. This photograph comes from Porto, Portugal.
We were in Porto twice on this trip. After starting in Lisbon and then visiting Coimbra, we arrived in Porto for a one-night stay before heading up the Douro River to Pinhão to start our walk. After the walk we spent another four nights in Porto. Sunsets here can be spectacular. The coastal location helps, as does the river winding through the city, and there are lots of elevated locations from which to catch the view. The La Ribeira waterfront area is in the foreground.
“A Trogir Street” — A person sits at outdoor tables along an empty street in Trogir, Croatia.
During the summer of 2023 we took a 10-week looping trip through parts of Europe. We concluded the trip with about a week and a half in Croatia. The first few days were spent in Dubrovnik, and then we moved on to the vicity of Trogir, not far from Split, where we joined a big group of extended family members. Being so close to historic Trogir, we spent a good amount of time there.
The old town of Trogir is picturesque enough that it is now very popular with tourists, for better or for worse. Much of the construction is of these very light colored stones — they are found in the buildings, the walls, and the streets and sidewalks. I photographed this scene while out on a little photo walk with my friend Franka M. Gabler who knows this area well.
“Albanian Farm Valbona Valley” — A gravel road leads toward an Albanian farm in the Valbona Valley.
This is another photograph from our fascinating but brief foray into Albania from our Kosovo home base back in the summer of 2023. A member of our “European family” who is from Kosovo took us on a tour up in to the Valbona Valley where we saw the spectacular Albanian Alps. On our return trip down the valley we briefly paused at this spot.
If I’m remembering the event correctly — and not superimposing two separate stops — we spotted a rural mosque across the river in this beautiful valley with the peaks in the distance. I wanted to photograph it, of course, so we all stopped and briefly walked around the area. Just upstream from a bridge across the river I saw this farm — or is it a homestead, or something else entirely?
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