Another 52 Weeks — #26 and 27
You never know where life will take you
Welcome to the third combined edition of “Another 52 Weeks” for 2025. The weekly installments will begin again next week, but I want to explain why we are here now.
You never know where life will take you.
As a child, I was jealous when my mom mentioned all the places she had seen while growing up. Her family — mom, her father and stepmother — spent a month traveling the U.S. by car from Texas into Canada each summer during the 1950s. That wasn’t bad for a little girl who spent the first six years of her life in a small, poor West Texas town while her father, then a new widower, worked as a Seabee in the Pacific during World War II.
When my parents married, they intended to do the same, but my dad’s illness thwarted most of those plans. After he became sick when I was 8, we took only one major vacation outside the state of Texas. It was an ill-fated trip in 1975 to Disney World in a crowded Winnebago jammed with my parents, 4-year-old sister, paternal grandparents, and aunt and uncle.
Suffice it to say, that was a trip in more ways than one.
I did go to Colorado when I was in my teens, and then to Washington, D.C., for a Close Up trip as a high school junior, but most family travel was confined to Texas. Until I moved to North Carolina in the mid 1990s, I largely stayed in my home state.
In 2001, we moved to Northern Virginia and I took a job with a nonprofit national association that served school boards. The job took me around the U.S., and gave Jill and me the means to travel with our kids.
The travel bug really bit when our son Ben started touring with “Billy Elliot” and later with “Newsies.” We had a complex family arrangement that meant going to different cities at least once a month, giving me opportunities to explore new places with my camera.
The traveling has continued since the kids grew up and moved on. My freelance business, which started in 2013, took me to conferences and magazine stories in various states. As empty nesters, Jill and I started taking trips abroad. In 2019 BC (before Covid), I went to more than a dozen states for work and family.
And then things ground largely to a halt for three plus years. Covid decimated my business, and it wasn’t until 2024 that the travel really started picking up again.
I was worried that this year would be the same. January through March was dead on the business front, which gave me the chance to finish my photo book (ironically, in this sense, on the isolation of COVID).
And then, almost as suddenly as it had stopped five years before, things started picking back up.
From April to June, I’ve photographed:
Six performances and a dress rehearsal of a dance recital over five days.
Four multiple day conferences — two in D.C. and two out of state.
Four ballet performances over two days.
Headshots and dancer portraits for three days.
Two large church events.
Two concerts, one of which was an eight-hour multiple act show
A World War I theatre revue and a VetSports benefit
All of this, combined with family obligations (including our daughter’s wedding), has taken me to Texas, Oklahoma, Philadelphia, New York (twice), California, North Carolina, and Kansas. I’ve been to more states in the past 12 weeks than I did in my first 21 years.
It’s a reminder that you never know where life will take you if you let it.
Thanks for following me on this journey and enjoy the rest of the photos. See you next week (I promise).
To be able to travel for fun, or to have to travel for work is a joy. There is so much to see, especially in the quiet scenes that escape most eyes. The devil is in the details, they say. Another nice batch of photos you have here!
I enjoyed your photos and reflections, as always. I appreciate your thoughts about the ebb and flow of travel opportunities.
My wife and I used to travel a lot -- at our pre-pandemic peak, we usually did a trip to Europe, another week in the States, and a handful of long weekends -- but we've been grounded the last 3 1/2 years because we adopted a rescue with severe separation anxiety. Travel now means lining up a handful of very conscientious dogsitters for our two rescues. Louie is a sweet boy and we don't want him to suffer. Your essay is a good reminder that our current lack of travel is not a permanent state.