Another Year of Travel on the Horizon
March 29, 2026
Today, we have a very special guest blogger for your reading enjoyment--Rick! Julie decided to take the winter off and let him take the wheel this time. She might decide to do some light editing, or maybe she'll just let the post stand as is. Or, maybe she'll decide to completely re-write it. Who knows? So, here it goes...
Julie's brief insertion (yes, already)...
We made our annual trek up north for the Christmas holiday season, and a good time was had by many for much of the time (the "many" changed each day, depending upon who was sick at any given moment).
Julie forgot that she had already included this picture from the Tampa airport in the last post, but since it apparently left an impression, here it is again.
Yay--they ordered up some snow for our arrival! 🙂
Some of us having fun...
Depending on your point of view, you may not consider this much snow "fun"--but we did!
Some of us not having fun...
Ok, back to Rick...
After our return to Tampa, we took advantage of some exceptionally warm January weather to ride our bikes along the coast north of St. Petersburg, starting in Dunedin and riding out to Honeymoon Island State Park.
This was a very pleasant ride through the cute town of Dunedin with a left turn heading out across the causeway to the state park where we spent a pleasant afternoon.
A washed-up sea sponge
A roseate spoonbill (we thought it was a flamingo)
A gopher tortoise
Afterwards, as we were beginning to settle into our winter Florida routine, Julie's aging laptop finally stopped working (might be related to the cup of tea Rick spilled on it last year). At first, Rick tried to fix it.
Oh, the carnage
In the end, the patient could not be saved, so it was time to get a new laptop for Julie. We picked out a mid-level Lenovo Yoga which luckily runs Linux (we are heathens--or revolutionaries, depending upon whom you ask) and has a nice bright OLED screen (which is now a must for us as we are often sitting outside on the deck). Since BestBuy had a great sale on it, we decided to buy a second identical laptop, so that Rick would not forever suffer from laptop envy 🙂.
Rick also decided it was finally time to try making his photosphere pictures by hand instead of relying on the functionality built into the camera. There are a couple of reasons driving the desire to create the photospheres by hand. The first driving force is that Rick's phone (Pixel 7a) happens to be the last version of Pixel phones that support the photosphere mode in the camera app so there is the eventual reality that he will need to update phones and will loose the built in functionality (although there are some options for using a modified camera app that re-enables the functionality). The second and more annoying force is that he can't reliably take photospheres when we are on water with a flat horizon (without the built in photosphere software getting confused and messing up the stitching). There is open source software (Hugin) which allows stitching photos but requires quite a steep learning curve. The first "home made" photosphere was just at our park in front of our RV - not really very scenic but does show our winter parking spot nicely.
Look around at our "home" and first test!
After playing around for quite a while, Rick had figured out what camera settings to use and how many images to take in the proper orientations. Since he was was bored with RV park images and wanted some variety, we took a short trip to a nearby park along the bay .
This provided a nice test of close up structures and de-duplicating people
This provided a nice test of trying to edit things that won't stitch (the sidewalk)
Didn't quite get the sky color right, but got the boardwalk to match up.
Watery horizon with somewhat featureless sand in the foreground.
Creating the photospheres by hand does take some time - generally between half an hour and two hours for each image, depending upon how complex the stitching is and if there is some required post processing. This will give Rick something to do when Julie sorts through photos (which can also take a considerable amount of time). With this testing complete, it seems like it is time to jump in with both feet and start using the new method exclusively and see what happens!
In what has become an annual tradition, we made our pilgrimage to Anna Maria Island which conveniently was a good test for the new "hand made" photospheres.
Both of our batteries were almost completely dead by the end of this trip - guess those new tires really do take a toll on battery life!
There is no end to the creativity involved in the naming of porta-potty companies
Random folks out on the water selling hotdogs?
Got their bases covered!
Look around at a typical beach shot on Anna Maria Island.
Look around and check out how flat that water horizon is now that I can fix it by hand!
If these photospheres are any representation of what the future holds in hand making photospheres, then Rick will be very happy to spend the extra time in exchange for being able to "hand craft" them!
This year, we decided to cross the bridge to Longboat Key for some scenery we hadn't seen in years past.
Looks like a Caribbean island!
A school of drum fish (aka redfish)
We stopped at Coquina Beach and watched the setup for a beach wedding - look around!
A violinist practicing before a beach wedding
The final weeks leading to our departure found us stocking up on items that are hard to purchase while on the road, along with any final camper fixes and cleaning, so that we could start this year's adventure all ready to go. (Pretty boring stuff, so no pictures.)
And now, we leave you with our 2026 route (beginning April 1)...
Here's our 2026 itinerary:
April: Florida, Alabama, a night in Arkansas, Oklahoma May: Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado June: Utah, Idaho, Oregon July: Washington, Vancouver Island (British Columbia) August: Washington, Montana, North Dakota September: Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas October: Kansas, Arkansas November: Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida December-March 2027: Florida
As always, if anyone wants to meet up with us in wherever, USA, let us know!
As it turned out, Julie didn't do a whole lot to change Rick's post. Just a little word-smithing here and there, the occasional comma insertion, a few deletions--you know, things that used to be done by people once known as proofreaders. Oh, and some filling in with photos that were taking up space on her phone. And a few interjections. And moving things around a little. But that was all 😉.
Random final picture for you birders out there...
An anhinga, sometimes called snakebird, water turkey, or devil bird
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