Ellen and I recently had the good fortune to spend 10 days in Montana, three days visiting long time friends in Bozeman, and then seven days with our elder daughter and her family in the Big Sky area . It was a thoroughly delightful time: beautiful weather — clear skies, clean air, and day-time temperatures in the mid- 70’s; a homemade fire pit, wood gathering, and s’mores; rafting, hiking, biking, horseback riding, zip lining, kayaking; a wonderful house perched some 8,000 feet in the sky; evenings of good food (even the children tried bison one night!); and all of us working together on a 1,000 piece puzzle.
Today’s post is for those of you who enjoy seeing “Thru Ellen’s Lens” — her photos from our various travels. As she said repeatedly through out the trip, “They don’t call this Big Sky country for nothing.” You’ll see that and more.
If you want to see more than the 10 photos below, you can click on the link at the end of this page to see her full 40 photos on Flickr. (Snuck in between the landscapes you’ll even find a few pictures of our three oldest grandchildren, but you’ll have to click on the link below to do so.)
If you want to see more of Ellen’s photos of Montana (and a few of the grandchildren), use this link to Ellen’s slide show: Thru Ellen’s Lens: Montana.
For the best viewing, click on the tiny arrow in the rectangular box near thetop right of the first page of the linkto start the slide show. See all the photos in the largest size possible (use a laptop or desktop computer if you have access to either).
Ellen recently came across the German word Fernweh in an article on a travel site she follows, Atlas Obscura. This particular article struck both of us as an additional way to think about travel. We now have had some time to consider this idea of Fernwith even more, and it’s a concept we want to pass on to others.
Fernwith literally translates as “farsickness.” It’s the idea of feeling homesick for a place to which you’ve never been. What a wonderful idea, and one that rings true for me. One example: for at least 30 years I wanted to go to Antarctica for reasons I only partially understood. So too about traveling to Alaska, China, the Southwest in the US, the Lake Country in England, and other places. (We’ve been fortunate in being able to travel to all those places and many more.) Our traveling will cease for the foreseeable future. If, as we all hope, the world emerges from the current COVID-19 crisis and its fallout, we will of course travel again, including to places to which we have never been.
We wonder if others have experienced a sense of Fernweh?
In the meantime, we’re posting our third and final edition of commentary and photos from our recent SE Asia trip. In the 12 photos below you’ll see a combination of just a few shots from Bali, Singapore, and more from Papua New Guinea (PNG). There are links to three new slide shows if you want to see more. (We previously posted about the tribal peoples we met in PNG Before They Pass Away.)
A few more details to add about our stay in Papua New Guinea. As we mentioned we had a very special guide there — Alan Manning fromSouth Sea Horizons. We based our week in the countryside in two towns, Goroka and Mt. Hagen, both in the Highlands region. From there we explored the central highlands and daily life; took a deep dive into coffee growing, grading, and exporting business; had dinner with a family who is involved in both the coffee business and also in running a school; took an unforgettable day-long drive between the two towns mentioned above with stops at roadside stands and markets; and took extended walks through local markets and villages. We concluded our time in PNG with one day in the capital, Port Moresby and enjoyed its outstanding ethnographic National Museum & Art Gallery.
Singapore was an unexpected learning experience. We knew very little about its 50 year experiment with a type of government that appears to put community above the individual, albeit with strong authoritarian leadership. This is a very “planned” country/city, pretty much opposite from PNG and only partially similar to other major places in the world. In architecture it is a city both ultra modern with colonial aspects preserved. Its Chinatown, Arabtown, Indiatown, etc. contrasts with its 81 skyscrapers, more than 4,000 tall buildings, numerous high-end malls, and it has spectacular gardens. The food, as predicted, was fantastic, from the hawking markets to the small restaurants to the haute cuisine ones. The cleanliness and orderliness was unlike any other Asian country/city where we’ve been. (We did not try to confirm the rumor that if you spit on the streets you will be arrested.)
We had terrific guide who, over three days, not only introduced us to the city/state we describe above. We learned how it is governed and details about its housing, transportation, city planning, environmental, social, and medical policies which we found advanced, thoughtful, and very progressive. I have continued my reading about Singapore and particularly its visionary first leader, Lee Kuan Yew, who is in large part is responsible for the direction of the country over the past 50 years. Our Singapore ‘experience’ has led to my reexamination of our American belief that the individual and personal independence comes first, ahead of community.
,We ended our month long trip with four days based in the interior of Bali (Indonesia) in the town of Ubud. This was planned as a luxurious, relaxing end to our almost month long trip. However, as is probably not surprising, we turned it in to further exploration of a place we had never been. Again, we had a guide whom we continuously questioned and who patiently told us about his island, language, customs and rituals of its people. One long day was also spent with a delightful young man who took us to a mere seven of the more than 15,000 temples in Bali and told us more than we will ever remember about the role and rituals of religion in Bali. Another full day was devoted to a long drive to the eastern part of Bali and the best cooking ‘class’ we’ve ever had, which included almost two hours in a market, learning about, sampling, and gathering the ingredients that we later spent four hours preparing and finally eating. We did, of course, fit in three additional fine meals.
And then we began our 24+ hour return to the US, through airports where everyone seemed to be wearing masks and to be avoiding each other and where we had promised our children we’d do our best to stay safe. To our children’s relief, (and our own) we have been home now for well over a month and have shown no signs of illness.
Enjoy these 12 photos and check out the three slide shows if you want to see more of PNG, Singapore, and Bali through Ellen’s lens. (See link below.)
Contrary to what some of you may think, Ellen and I are not spending all of our time traveling, going to movies, reading books, seeing friends, finding wonderful restaurants, following baseball, or stressing about the state of our nation.
We now have five grand children, and when Ellen is not making picture books from our travels (she’s up to 25 now!), she focuses on Eli, 10, Abigail, 8, Ryan almost 6, Samantha 3, and Brooke 18 months.
Today’s post are photos from the last three or four weeks, some from a weekend when all five were together and some from KC and others from DC/MD.
I initially chose MillersTime as the title of this website because I thought it described my newly retired status and defined what I wanted to write about — my varied interests and activities. (If you are want to know more about my interest in writing, see an earlier post, Why I Write.)
In my mind, “MillersTime” was a singular endeavor (Although I couldn’t figure out the mechanics of putting an apostrophe in the title, I like that it sounded a bit like my own newspaper). As it developed, I began to include, along with my travel writing, photos that Ellen (my wife) had taken of the trips.
For some of you, Ellen’s photos are one of the best aspects of MillersTime.
For those of you who have enjoyed Ellen’s photos from one or more of our various trips, I’m posting below a list of and links to all of her photo slide shows (in case you might have missed one or two).
Remember to use your largest possible screen (laptops and desktops are much better for these photos than smartphones, for example). Also, once you click on the link to a particular slide show, be sure to click on the tiny arrow inside the little rectangle at the top right of your screen to start the slide show.
Here are a dozen of Ellen Miller’s favorite photos from our recent trip to Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia. Below these 12 are links to more photos in two slide shows.
These, and those in Ellen Miller’s Antarctica slide show (see instructions below), come from Ushuaia & the Beagle Channel, the Drake Passage, the South Shetland Islands, the Lemaire Channel, Booth & Petermann Islands, the Antarctic Circle, Port Lockroy and Paradise Bay.
Here are a dozen of Ellen’s favorite photos from a recent trip we took to England. We spent four days on the southern coast of England and then returned to London so Ellen could work, and I could play.
If you would like to see the entire group of pictures, click on the link at the end of these 12 pictures.
Click on this link to see all 67 pictures. They are much sharper than the ones I was able to put on this post.