It’s been awhile since I have participated in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, but I am back in time to contribute to this week’s bridges!
CFFC: Bridges to…Adventures
Budapest, Hungary
Life in Colour: Blues
Jude’s Travel Words blog’s topic for Life in Colour this month is the color blue. Jude challenges us to find “unusual” blues! OK, I’ll do my best…
CFFC: Colorful Buildings
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge continues with her theme “all about buildings” and this week’s topic is colorful buildings.
In Amsterdam, Holland:
the red light district
De Pijp neighborhood (across from our Airbnb)
Miltenberg, Germany:
storefront
the Town Hall (Rathaus)
Wurzburg’s colorful cathedral:
Budapest, Hungary:
Todos Santos, Baja California, Mexico:
Costa Rica:
Sports stadium in Aswan, Egypt:
Tucumcari, New Mexico, USA on Route 66:
Shamrock, Texas (Route 66):
Cuba, Missouri (Route 66):
Uranus, Missouri (Route 66):
CFFC: International Business
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge has the theme “all about buildings.” This week’s topic is commercial buildings or store fronts.
One of the fun things about traveling is all the different types of architecture you see. So I am posting photos of a variety of architectural styles and colors from some of my recent trips.
Monday Window: Dohany St. Synagogue
The Dohany St. Synagogue, also known as the Great Synagogue, in Budapest, Hungary, is the largest synagogue in Europe and the 4th largest in the world. It can accommodate close to 3,000 worshippers.
The synagogue was built between 1854 and 1859 in the Moorish Revival style, incorporating decoration based on Islamic models from North Africa and la Alhambra in Granada, Spain. The Viennese architect reasoned that no distinctive Jewish style of architecture could be identified, so he used elements from the people most closely related to the Israelites, most particularly the Arabs.
The synagogue constituted the border of the Jewish Ghetto in Budapest during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, and the complex includes the Jewish Museum, Heroes’ Temple, the graveyard and Holocaust Memorial.
The Dohany St. Synagogue is the center of the Reform Jewish denomination in Budapest. From there, you can take a walking tour of the Jewish Quarter, an interesting historic area in the Pest part of the city.
Posted for Ludwig’s Monday Window photo challenge.
Information obtained from Wikipedia.
LAPC: The Lazy Days of Summer
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #104 is about summer. Ah, summer! My favorite season of the year! Even with the distancing measures of Covid-19, I can enjoy the summer. (Imagine if the shelter-in-place had been in the winter – we’d REALLY get cabin fever!)
Two recent photos of our senior community that represent summer:
Memories of summers gone by: on this day in …
Flowers in bloom everywhere:
In summer, people like to be in and around water.
One Word Sunday: Umbrella
Debbie’s Travel With Intent has a weekly photo challenge, One Word Sunday, and the word this week is umbrella. I tend to not have an umbrella when I need one (and do have one when it doesn’t rain after all), but I like this topic!
Tuesday Photo Challenge & CFFC: Eye Candy
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week begins a series exploring the five senses. This week is sight. She says: As the saying goes, a picture worth a thousand words. Think of photos you can take or have already taken that remind you of a fabulous sight. I like to call it “Eye Candy”. Several of the photos I picked out are of animals, which is conveniently the topic of Dutch Goes the Photo’s Tuesday Photo Challenge.
A romantic couple: Swans make a “heart” after mating, in one of our community ponds.
Cheetah mom and cub frolic in Tanzania:
After watching these two gamboling for about half an hour, I decided the cheetah is now my favorite wild animal!
In a close second place are these adorable genets, who reside at Ndutu Safari Lodge. They looked down at us with such curious faces, and sat up there so quietly observing the humans down below.
My youngest “grandcat” Freddie – how can I help falling in love with this guy??
Here is my own beautiful cat, Hazel! This is an early photo of her, but it has always been my favorite.
This is a more recent photo of her, taken in our new house.
I guess it’s clear that I just love cats in general! (Genets are not cats, but they sort of look like cats.)
More eye candy is to be found in the beauty of nature.
A sunset in Tanzania
Cathedral Rock as seen from the campus of Verde Valley School, Sedona, Arizona 
Flowers: at Chicago Botanic Gardens
Dahlia at Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, WA
I love to look at beautiful works of humankind as well.
In St. Matthias Church, Budapest
If I had to lose either my sight or my hearing, I think I would choose being deaf than missing out on the beauties of our world.
Thursday Doors: Doors on My Travels
Because we’re not going anywhere right now, I have compiled a collection of doors I have photographed during recent travels for Norm’s Thursday Doors. In fact, I don’t think I’ve shared these doors before! (Well, maybe a few of them.)
Three doors at the Louvre in Paris, France:
Aswan, Egypt: Store fronts and stadium
Lotus gate in Aswan
Synagogue entrance in Jerusalem, Israel
Church door, Vienna, Austria
Courtyard, Vienna
Store front, Vienna
Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna
St. Matthias Church, Budapest, Hungary
Budapest
Top o’ the Morning!
I don’t usually get up early. Especially now – what’s the point? I can’t go anywhere anyway! I have a routine of getting up, getting a cup of tea (I can’t tolerate coffee anymore, although I love it), a banana and a piece of Babybel cheese, and then going to a comfortable spot to read and enjoy my morning snack. In warm weather, I like to sit on the porch and breathe the morning air. So it’s usually 10 a.m. or later before I get going with my day.
But when we travel with tour groups, we often have to get up very early, and on those occasions I do have the opportunity to appreciate the early morning, or Top o’ the morning, as the Irish say, (and in order to fit into Becky’s April Square Tops!)
So for Lens-Artists photo challenge#93 with the topic morning, I am posting some photos I took early in the morning while traveling, mostly with tours, in 2018-2019.
ON SAFARI
On safari, it’s a given to get up really early, so you can have breakfast and go on a game drive in the early morning when the animals tend to be more active. So every day, our alarm was set for 6 a.m. – when I hear that alarm tune on my husband’s tablet, I still think I’m in Tanzania!
On the patio of our lodge at Tarangire – 6:48 a.m.
Same exact time the next morning – what a view overlooking Tarangire National Park!
After this beautiful sunrise in Serengeti National Park…
…we had a picnic breakfast in the park!
DES MOINES, IOWA
My husband tends to wake up really early whenever we’re sleeping somewhere away from home. Sometimes he wakes me up too. Here we got a great photo overlooking the river toward downtown Des Moines. You can see the capitol building in the distance!
From Best Western hotel room window, 7:12 a.m. in late September
EGYPT
We were in Egypt in the winter, so I often captured the rising sun between 8 and 9 a.m.!
The Great Pyramid of Giza, at 9:46 a.m.
View from our hotel room at the Sofitel Winter Palace in Luxor, 6:53 a.m.
We took a 5-day cruise up the Nile, in an Egyptian style dahabeya. This type of boat doesn’t have a motor – it’s towed by tug or unfurls its sails, but because of this, we couldn’t travel at night. We docked at Besaw Island one night, and in the morning, the trees were golden in the light of the rising sun, at 6:58 a.m.
At the end of the five-day cruise, we had arrived at Aswan, where we had to disembark. We had a long day ahead, so I took this shot at 6:24 a.m. at the breakfast table on board.
The next morning, we were at a rustic lodge in Abu Simbel, where I took this photo from the patio, with a view of several islands on this part of the Nile. Since the Aswan High Dam was built, this part of the Nile is now a lake. 6:57 a.m.
This was part of our view from Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan (where Agatha Christie wrote her famous mystery, Death on the Nile) at 7:20 a.m.
At 6:22 a.m. the next morning, we were already on a bus which would take us to the Aswan airport, to fly back to Cairo.
ISRAEL
In order to cram as many sites as possible into one day, our tour company in Israel required us to be on the bus no later than 7:30. So we got up at 6 a.m. every morning, and went downstairs to breakfast between 6:30 and 7:00.
We were on the road already when I took this photo of the Sea of Galilee receiving rays from the early morning sun, at 7:52 a.m. in early January 2019.
The next day, I took this photo at 6:57 a.m. from our hotel room overlooking Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee, before we went down to breakfast.
We traveled south toward the Dead Sea, seen here between 7 and 8 a.m.
We were in Jerusalem for the last few days of the tour. This is at the Church of All Nations, at 7:50 a.m. We explored the outside first, and were allowed inside at 8:00.
Only a few of the faithful are at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to say their prayers at 8:05 a.m. The women’s section is more crowded because it is a lot smaller.
EUROPE
On our European cruise last summer, we only had to get up very early a couple of days. Usually, we’d wake up and go out on the balcony of our stateroom.
I must have had insomnia, because I took this photo as we were cruising into Vienna at 3:56 a.m. in early July!
The sun was full up on this cloudy day when I took this photo. It was 8:55 a.m. and I was getting my first look at Budapest just before our ship docked!
Although when I’m home, I stay up late (I’m writing this after midnight! – I’m late, sorry, Becky!) and get up late the next morning, when we travel, even on days we don’t have to get up early, we usually do because we are excited! I cherish these last trips we took before the quarantine put a stop to my planning for the next trip, scheduled for this month! But we won’t be stuck at home forever, and I look forward to more adventures soon!
Wanderlust & Wonderment 