52 Weeks — #35

With summer's end in sight, here's an expanded look from the past few months

Aug 31, 2024

My wife in the ocean off the Amalfi Coast of Italy — May 2024

For Labor Day weekend, I decided to do an expanded version of “52 Weeks” — 14 photos (and a bonus) instead of the usual seven — to give you my take on a most unusual summer of travel.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve tried to lead the “52 Weeks” essays — plus one called “How I Spent My Summer” that wasn’t really about that — with a view of what’s been going on in our lives. But, with rare exceptions, I haven’t shared what I’ve captured with my camera during this time.

More "52 Weeks"

And I’ve captured A LOT, between work assignments and the random images that catch my eye. I just haven’t taken the time to edit the random ones.

This week, we’ve spent time with the family on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a lovely seven days with a rotating and overlapping cast of children, their spouses/significant others, and our two grandchildren. It’s been a lovely and much-needed break for us all, amid the growing recognition of how difficult it is to get everyone together at the same time.

For the first time in who knows how long, I didn’t turn on my computer for six days and checked my phone only a handful of times. That ended on Friday, when I had a quick work assignment to check on and plans to get this post ready. Prompted by a quick family photo shoot on the beach the night before, I decided then to scan through the summer’s images for this post.

Quickly, I realized it was impossible to edit them down to seven, so I decided to do 14 instead. Even that was tough, considering Jill and I started the summer with a trip to Italy at the end of May and have been gone from home for much of the time since. In addition to the nine days in Italy, we had a number of “N” trips (North Carolina, New York, New Orleans — where I saw nothing but the hotel at a conference), an “O” trip (Outer Banks), a Fourth of July trip to Wintergreen, and a trip to Texas.

Leaving for New Orleans — Reagan National Airport, June 2024

The purpose of this series has been to showcase random images with no real theme, and despite the overarching idea of a single summer of travel, I’ve managed to keep to that this week.

So without further ado (or blather), here are the rest of this week’s images: