The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Agriturismo La Fonte di Mariella

After Venice, we stayed here, way up in the hills above Gravedona on Lake Como:

It was gorgeous, and Mariella was a gracious and lovely host. Just one thing, though. It's 825 m up in the foothills of the Alps, reachable on a winding road with 6 km of switchbacks, ending at this driveway:

In this car:

We named the little guy Boba Fiat. It's not one of those high-powered North American models; no, it's a 0.9-liter European model that took four attempts to get up the Agriturismo's driveway the first time. (The trick turned out to be revving the engine up to 3,000 RPM and sliding the clutch in slowly.)

Boba Fiat got us all over Northern Italy on one tank of petrol, though. That was helpful.

Venice, Monday

I took 324 photos on Monday, so I'm not all the way through them yet. I'll just start with a photo of our hotel's lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Danieli, a 193-year-old hotel in a 600-year-old building:

This was our one hotel splurge. I do not know the exact bill, except that it was approximately the same as the next four nights' lodging combined.

Travels over, packing continuing

I've got about 990 photographs to comb through, which I'll start doing later this afternoon. Meanwhile I'm unpacking so I can do laundry and pack again.

It's weird to think I'll only be in my house another seven days after spending the last nine away from it.

In the hills

I'm in a remote area with slow Internet for the next couple of days. You will see photos, and descriptions, and probably Yelp reviews coming up...but for today and probably a lot of tomorrow, less so. (Click on the globe icon below for some insight.)

It turned out, visiting Venice for only one day worked exactly right. More on that, too, as time warrants.

The Blackbird

The Southampton Arms remains my favorite pub in London, but The Blackbird comes in a close second:

I wound up having breakfast and dinner there yesterday, followed up with drinks at a suburban-feeling club down the block. (Maybe not suburban; more like bridge-and-tunnel.)

Now I'm at Gatwick waiting for my next flight to phase II of this trip: Venice. So far the flight is only delayed 40 minutes. And I may have figured out the Lightroom problem, or at least found a workaround. More on all of this later tonight or tomorrow.

On the road again

Traveling today, so no postings until much later. Possibly tomorrow.

Photos too. I did a field-test of my Surface, and everything worked, once I re-installed Lightroom. I hope I don't have to do that again.

Revisiting another HDR photo

As I'm still getting to know Lightroom 6 and its HDR feature, I wanted to revisit this one from 2013:

Here's the refresh. I think it's a more subtle result, and looks more like what I actually saw in Hampstead Heath:

On my next trip (in two days), I'll probably take a lot more HDR-ready images. The Canon 7D Mark II does a sort-of draft HDR in-camera, with a number of options for generating the raw files that my old camera didn't have. I'm looking forward to the results.