Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Way back at the end of July, a couple of friends and I joined a guided kayak trip to the Sucia Island Marine State Park (San Juan Islands, Washington). The tour was run by Anacortes Kayak Tours , which did a fantastic job. Note on the photography: many of these shots were done with my iPhone 15 Pro Max, which does a very good job, for a phone. I didn't want to take a good camera onto the salt water, so the rest are shot on a long-retired Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot, as the one of my old cameras with the longest zoom. It was not without issues.  Since the meet-up time was 9 a.m. on Orcas Island, we drove up and took the ferry to Orcas the day before. That gave us time to poke around the island a bit and get a seafood dinner. We camped at Moran State Park (it turned out that all the members of our tour did that, though of course we didn't know each other then and were in different campgrounds). As it happened, the morning ferry was 45 minutes late, so we all hung out at the b...

Last week I began the account of our cruise to Antarctica with the crossing of the Drake Passage and our first morning's zodiac cruise. Today, I have photos from the first afternoon, kayaking with the icebergs. Unlike kayakers on some other days, we didn't have any close encounters with whales, but we did have beautiful weather and water conditions. Our ship, the Plancius , provided all the necessary gear, including wet suits and paddling jackets. It felt like a lot of clothes as we layered them on over long underwear, but actually kayaking was a warmer activity that sitting in a zodiac (and had less wind chill).  What the fashionable Antarctic paddler wears (though the camera bag wasn't a common accessory). Since I don't much care for being cold and wet, I was glad to see the glassy calm of the Errera Channel around Danco Island, our kayaking area. The shore-landing party headed out before us. We had our own zodiac ride to bring us closer to where we wanted to paddle,...

It's been a while since I got out a photo post, but I haven't forgotten that I've a bunch of trips and sights still to share! I also realize I still haven't shared a couple of other trips we did before this one, including the Milford Track, but since I've started here, I'll do this and get back to the others. Our visit to Abel Tasman National Park on the northern end of the South Island of New Zealand (got all that? :D) was a special one. We broke from our standard hiking pattern, as well as from the huts, and rented kayaks and reserved spaces in the beach-front camping grounds. The three-night, four-day trip involved two days of kayaking, then two days hiking back. Abel Tasman is probably the most heavily visited of New Zealand's national parks, with as many as 5-7000 people on the water, beaches, and trails on a peak-season day. I could see why (and was glad that we were a bit off the peak). On the drive north from Christchurch, we spent 5 or 10 minutes wa...