Category Archives: travelphotography

Portobello Road Market & Notting Hill

Travel Tuesday is here and since it is our first Tuesday of the month it means our themed post! November’s prompt is ‘relationships’. I love solo travel but I just as much appreciate the relationships I have when I travel with family and friends. On a recent trip to London with my visiting family we made the rush from where we were in Wales to get to the Portobello Road market. We were not sure we would make it in time and I am so glad that we did because we had a great time! While we were out I spotted with my camera this couple enjoying their relationship with a passionate kiss in the middle of Notting Hill. I had to recreate this romantic gesture with my husband and have shared the pair of kissing photos below.

I hope you will love the rest of these…there were just so many things to photograph and my eyes were on sensory overload. I loved all the silver and found the antiques and old cameras my favourite things to look at in the market. My sister, a level II sommelier enjoyed all the smells of the food stalls like the lush varieties of mushrooms. Even my sons found some interesting things to purchase while they were out exploring. If you have seen Notting Hill, the travel bookshop was in the blue ‘Notting Hill’ store front you see in the photographs. I definitely recommend making the point to go to this market when you are next in London and venture into Notting Hill. Much thanks again to my friend Lauren for letting us stay at your place while we were in town.

———-

Share your Travel stories and wanderlust addictions.

HERE IS HOW IT WORKS:

1. Share a post about travel! From road trips to trips abroad and from past travels to dream vacations. You can write about travel tips and tricks, favorite places to stay, or anything in between! Just make it about traveling somewhere!

2. Grab the lovely button. If you run into trouble, just make sure to mention Bonnie in a link! 😉

3. Linkup goes live every Tuesday at 9 am GMT.

4. Hop around and meet new travel loving bloggers! Link up will be open for a few days, make sure to check back to visit some of the newer travel posts!

5. Please only one linked up post per blogger. Save other posts for future linkups!

6. The First Tuesday of every month will be a themed prompt if you want to join in!

Barmouth Beach Pt. II

24 Replies

So happy to have another Travel Tuesday with you all and getting my fix of wanderlust by hopping around all the travel posts. I hope you guys are meeting some great bloggers! I just found out that I will be attending a London Bloggers Tea next month and I cannot wait to share that all with you here on ACR. There seems to be so much going on still in 2013, so I want to share few things with you here:

Link Up! Join the link up at the bottom of the post with any travel, wanderlust, or expat post from your blog. Then hop around and get your travel fix from visiting other blogs.
Join the Map! If you click the Map link you can add your Travel and Expat blog to our ever growing map of bloggers!
Get Ready! The first Tuesday of November will be our themed Travel Tuesday post and the theme for the month will be: Relationships. Perhaps post about a place you would love to go next and tell us who you would bring with you or share your favourite family photographs from your recent trip this summer! The choice is yours and I look forward to seeing what you come up with next month.
Join the Sidebar! I love sharing travel and expat posts and stories on my blog from other travelers. Become a November Sponsor today!

Today I am going to be following up my travel post from Barmouth Wales, when I posted about The Beach at Barmouth Pt. I back in the summer. This is part II and our third trip to Barmouth Beach during our 10th Anniversary Vow Renewal trip to Wales. We just loved being at the seaside and this time we actually go into the cold water. Well my sons did anyways and the rest of us enjoyed hanging out on the beach. The picturesque views and salty air were just what I needed. Now that it is getting cold and November is approaching, I really enjoy soaking up the last memories of Summer.

(Also as a side note the girl pictured below is my sister)

———-

Share your Travel stories and wanderlust addictions.

HERE IS HOW IT WORKS:

2. Grab the lovely button. If you run into trouble, just make sure to mention Bonnie in a link! 😉

3. Linkup goes live every Tuesday at 9 am GMT.

4. Hop around and meet new travel loving bloggers! Link up will be open for a few days, make sure to check back to visit some of the newer travel posts!

5. Please only one linked up post per blogger. Save other posts for future linkups!

6. The First Tuesday of every month will be a themed prompt if you want to join in!

My Family Photos in Wales

13 Replies

While we were in Wales this summer for our 10th Anniversary Vow Renewal, my friend Miriam took our family portraits. You can see the ones I took of her family at Travel: Cymer Abbey Family Portraits. If you love travel posts, remember tomorrow is Travel Tuesday and you can link up with us on the blog. We just got back our family portraits this weekend from the Cymer Abbey and I was so excited to share them all with you today on the blog. Since I had so many favourites I have kept out the romantic ones of just Ryan and I, to share for another day. These photographs are so precious to me because they contain our family members. It meant so much to us for our vow renewal that our family be there to support us. My mum and sister were ready to book their tickets once they heard the news last Christmas and I know my dad would have been here if he was still alive. I must have taken so many photographs myself of my mum and my sister with my boys, photos I know that Ronan and Maddox will cherish as they grow older. Family is everything to Ryan I and why we enjoyed our time in Wales so much. Here is mia familia (thank you so much Miriam!):

Favourite Travel Photo

11 Replies

For Travel Tuesday today I asked you to share with you a favourite travel photo for our first every Travel Tuesday prompt. We will do these prompts on first Tuesday of every month.

This is a photo I took in the summer of 2012 when I returned ‘home’ to bella Napoli. I had not been back to Italy since coming to see my friends graduate in the summer of 2001. Napoli, Italy had been my home for 4-6 grade and 9-11 grade but this was my first time to every bring my husband ‘home’ with me. It was a very special trip for both of us. Between the two of us and our cameras and phones we must have taken thousand of photographs while we were there. This photo is a pure favourite however because it is so iconic of my home. The beautiful bay of Napoli, Mt. Vesuvius in the background, and the coastline dotted with so many colours of homes, green trees, and pretty boats in the marina. This is definitely one photograph I would love to have blown up and put up in our family room.

———-

TRAVEL TUESDAY!
A Weekly Travel Linkup.

Share your Travel stories
and wanderlust addictions.

Here’s how it works:

2. Grab the lovely button. If you run into trouble, just make sure to mention Bonnie in a link! 😉

3. Linkup goes live every Tuesday at 8 am GMT.

4. Hop around and meet new travel loving bloggers! Link up will be open for a few days, make sure to check back to visit some of the newer travel posts!

5. Please only one linked up post per blogger. Save other posts for future linkups!

6. The First Tuesday of every month will be a themed prompt if you want to join in!

Q: Do you have a favourite travel photograph and why does it mean so much to you?

Travel is Life

3 Replies

Monday morning my internet went out and my blogging every day streak got postponed while I waited on the powers that be at Sky to fix the problem. Luckily today my internet and landline are back to working. So I apologize for not having Travel Tuesday up and hope you have all been able to link up with Belinda this week! If you have not linked up yet I have the link up below. This is Belinda’s last week of co-hosting the Travel Tuesday link up with me as she focuses on other avenues with her blog. Please make sure to let her know how much you loved having her as a cohost.

———-

Travel is life. Short and sweet that message has been my life. The fact that I have not lived in one place for longer than three years at a time solidifies that statement even more. Even if I am not traveling this month, on a plane to another country I feel like I am traveling in lifestyle. I have only lived in my current city for the last nine months and in three months we will be moving again. Not out of England but perhaps to another town. It is just my life of a highly nomadic person who constantly feels called to be somewhere else.

Next Trip. The next place I have my heart set on traveling to is Austria. It holds a lot of special memories for me with my life growing up in Europe. It is the one place that I really feel closest to my dad. We used to go snowboarding and skiing there through out the years. If you have read my blog for a while you will have heard me mention Germknödel as a food I miss eating in Austria. Germknödel is a fluffy yeast dough dumpling with a mix of poppy seeds and sugar, filled with spicy plum jam and melted butter on top, often eaten with custard on top. I used to love ordering it after a day of snowboarding. I have not had it in so long that I think of it a lot. Which brings me back to what it is like when travel is life. You travel and move so much that you miss things all over the world. Things that you can not easily satisfy and may take years in waiting. But I would not give up or trade this life for any other.

TRAVEL TUESDAY!
Together with my cohost Belinda
fromFound Love. Now What?
a Weekly Travel Linkup.
Share your Travel stories
and wanderlust addictions.

Grab button for A Compass Rose's Travel Tuesdays

Reliving: Travel Memories in Italy

13 Replies

It is the next edition of Travel Tuesday with my cohost Belinda. I look forward to reading all your posts in the link up this week. While it may take me a bit to comment on all your posts, I do read every single one. We are proud to announce a new exciting update starting next month! While we do Travel Tuesday every Tuesday, the first Tuesday of every month will be our themed prompts. On October 1st it will be the first Tuesday of the month and the prompt is: “Show us your most favourite photo from all your travels and tell us why it means so much to you”.

Also would like to bring to focus one of my favourites…of course I loved them all…Travel Tuesday posts from last week. Danielle from the Lifestyle Project blog had a great post about meeting boy in Cambodia. This story touched me on a personal level as I related to one of the sweet girls I met while I was in Cambodia. I still have the painting she did that I bought from her to bring home. She had one of the sweetest smiles I have ever seen.

This is also the next installment of Blogtember with Jenni. The prompt for today states, “A Memory You Would Love to Relive.”

A memory I would like to relive. There are so many that would be awesome to relive like old devolved films re-watch end over in my mind many times over. I thought of how easy it could be to mention my late father again or in the height of my baby fever about the birth of both of my sons. Then it hit me in preparation for my Travel Tuesday post just how special traveling is in my life. How there are certain trips that once taken cannot simply be revisited with a return flight. Which got me to focus on my memories of taking my husband ‘home’ for the first time.

Normally you bring your spouse home before you get married or shortly after depending on the circumstances. For me I brought Ryan to bella Napoli in Italia eleven years after we first met at University and nine years after we got married. It was not because I did not want him to see the place I have still lived longest than anywhere else in my life. But we had spent the majority of our relationship stateside, despite our best endeavors to find a way abroad.

Unfortunately the photos I took on my phone of Ryan’s first couple of days in Italy including our day in Rome and our first night in Napoli were gone when I got my phone stolen days later in that trip. You can read about my night in an Italian Jail for the story on that one.

So I would love to relive all of Ryan’s firsts in Italy again. To look into his eyes as he saw Rome for the first time after we got off the plane in Italy. To watch him try his first bite of pasta in Rome. His first real taste of gelato, the nectar from the gods. Of course his first bite of pizza in its birth place of Italy. It was one of those trips you cannot simply experience the same way again the second or third time around.

However my sons have yet to go to Italy. So on our next trip ‘home’ it will be my husband and I together watching as our sons experience the beauty if Italy for the first time. Smelling the Mediterranean salt air, tasting their first authentic pizza margherita, listening to the chorus of loud Neapolitan voices in the bush city streets, and watching their young eyes as they see where their mum grew up as a girl. Well for a total of six years in two different times of my life. For the other places that will be another trip here and another trip there. More memories to make together and more moments in time that I will live over and over again in my mind.

Q: Where would you like to go again from the places where you have traveled?

Here’s how it works:

2. Grab the lovely button. If you run into trouble, just make sure to mention Bonnie & Belinda in a link! 😉

3. Linkup goes live every Tuesday at 8 am GMT.

4. Hop around and meet new travel loving bloggers! Link up will be open for a few days, make sure to check back to visit some of the newer travel posts!

5. Please only one linked up post per blogger. Save other posts for future linkups!

Travel: Cymer Abbey & Family Portraits

29 Replies

So glad everyone is looking to these Travel Tuesdays! I have been looking for ways to make this even better so will be sharing my favourite posts every week as well as starting a once a month themed Travel Tuesday which we will start in October. More news about that next week so keep your ears opened! I want to say that sometimes travels are not just about pretty photos…it is about the times that go wrong. Who could have written it better than Claire from the Grass is Dancing. Check out this expat’s post from last week! Also do not forget you can win 45 days of ad space from me at ACR on my blogtember post yesterday.

Exploring Ruins.

In Wales near the town of Dolgella, in the village of Llanelltyd, are the ruins of a Cistercian abbey that was founded in 1158. The Cymer Abbey is just beautiful and it became a perfect backdrop for family photographs for us while we were in Wales. So for Travel Tuesday today I want to share with you how you can have family photographs while on vacation. All you need is to bring a professional photographer with you….like me! Here are some of my favourites from the day as my friend Miriam was expecting her fourth baby during this shoot.

Here’s how it works:

2. Grab the lovely button.

3. Linkup goes live every Tuesday at 8 am GMT.

4. Hop around and meet new travel loving bloggers! Link up will be open for a few days, make sure to check back to visit some of the newer travel posts!

5. Please only one linked up post per blogger. Save other posts for future linkups!

————-

I have a new featured sponsor on the Blog this month! Meet the stunning red head of The Skinny Girl blog. She is a girl after my own heart because even though she not yet left the US, her first destination goal is Italy! I will love getting to explore her first time in Venice having grown up in Napoli. Her blog is fun as she focuses around good recipes and fitness posts. You must check out this super yummy Salsa recipe. As an expat living in England I really miss a good salsa! Visit her blog and let me know what your favourite recipe is that you find!

Q: Have you ever thought of bringing a photographer with you on vacation?