let's go on a road trip: southwest

I've never been to the southwestern part of the country but am dreaming of it more and more...

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"there are no foreign lands..." (& secrets for you!)

When you go on a tropical vacation it's sort of expected that you post beautiful beach and sun photos, and while I have plenty of those and will share plenty more (see a few here), I want to first share with you some of the other photos from my time in the Caribbean last weekend. The beaches were, of course, amazing, but I was equally amazed by the life of the island itself, its people and its culture, its crooked houses on its narrow winding roads (and how people drive fast and reckless and on the left side), its food and drink (lots of rum!) and town and color and architecture.... and I thankfully got to see a lot of that--on the shuttle ride to and from the airport, walking the streets of downtown St. Thomas, and on a taxi ride that ended up taking us all over the island...(more on that later)...

Plus, everyone's seen beautiful photos of beautiful beaches--that doesn't make them any less beautiful, and I'm excited to share my beautiful beach photos, but these photos here are more special to me, more sacred...odd-angled snapshots of my experience on the island that are virtually impossible to recreate...  

So here, I share my secrets with you!

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” --Robert Louis Stevenson

paradise and what my brother deserves

Just a few of the 600 photos I took on our trip to St. Thomas this past weekend. This place is absolutely incredible. The water really is that blue! 

Now I'm back in Minnesota, and it is cold, and it is so hard to imagine that St. Thomas and all those other islands exist in this same world. Kind of like when I'm watching the sunset from 30,000 miles in the air, and it's so beautiful it makes my heart physically hurt and all I can think of is how so much beauty can exist in the same world as all the terrible things, like mean people and death and war, and then I think about my brother, who joined the Army last year and is probably going to be in Afghanistan by this summer and how I wish he could see this water and these beaches, how he deserves the whole world and how I wish I could give it to him but all I can do is send him these pictures with taped on flower petals I stole from the island.