Sure the name is a numerical exaggeration, but when you find yourself at boat level, winding through the watery maze of the Ten Thousand Islands, it feels about right.

The Ten Thousand Islands chain comprises the northwestern edge of Everglades National Park, and it includes hundreds of sandy cays, mangrove hammocks and oyster-bed reefs stretched along the Gulf Coast between Marco Island and Chokoloskee.

This estuarine tangle is where the interior swamps of the Everglades spill into the Gulf of Mexico—a rugged and untamed place that boasts a dearth of civilization and flurry of wildlife. As a matter of course, you catch watch osprey alight from their seaside nests and snatch dinner from the shallow mud flats, or paddle alongside groups of dolphins and sharks roiling in the tidal rivers.

This is kayak country at its finest. When we made our paddling trip here, we saw plenty of people with powerboats, but shallow waters, sharp oyster beds, and exposed mud flats can hinder all but the sleekest flats vessels. As kayakers, we could slip over sandbars, nose through narrow mangrove tunnels, and ride the tides onto remote island beaches with ease.

We set out on a four-day adventure from the national park headquarters in Everglades City. You have to stop here to get camping permits, and it’s a good idea to show up early because beach sites are limited and they are only given out on a first-come, first-served basis.

Fishing and the Ten Thousand Islands go hand-in-hand. Whether you use a fly rod or heavy tackle, you can pick your preferred style. As we paddled our route, we’d stop whenever the mood caught us, pulling into secluded coves to cast a lure near the mangrove roots where tasty speckled trout practically bite on command.

To truly experience the remote wilderness of the Ten Thousand Islands, you’ve got to go overnight, three or four days is even better. The multi-day option lets you camp on different islands, as well as spend a full day or two enjoying the area (the first and last days of the trip are mostly spent paddling to and from Everglades City—to make good time, try to coordinate your direction with the in- and outbound tides).

Just pitch a tent above the high-tide line and gather abundant driftwood for nights around a blazing a beach fire. When you’re staging for the trip, make sure to load your kayak smart with everything you need, like food, water, camping gear as well as maps and redundant navigation equipment. Also make sure you can secure it all at night (inside the boat’s cargo holds is Continue

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Given all that, it doesn’t take too long for me to go a little stir crazy and start looking for a dirt road to nowhere. Luckily it turns out my new home has those too. Despite highways as far as the eye can see, LA sits astride a string of mountains riddled with deep canyons and creek beds, which makes hiking Los Angeles a surpsingly easy proposition, even within the city limits.

Afternoon Escape

Thus it was that I found myself on a Wednesday afternoon, expressing my frustration to GG about a string of rejections from various editors…I should mention that, as my better half, GG has gotten pretty good at deciphering my various forms of grumpiness (mostly there’s just two: “hungry grumpy “and “annoyed-at-work grumpy”)…So she quickly hit upon the right idea. “Just take the dogs and go find a trail somehwere,” she said. “Fine,” I replied, briefly affecting my “I-know-you’re-right grumpy” demeanor.

From our home in the San Fernando Valley, we’re practically spitting distance from the Santa Monica Mountains, and it didn’t take long to pinpoint the ideal spot for an afternoon adventure. A few miles to the west, Topanga Canyon is like an oasis of tranquility amid the bustle of the city, with an almost commune-like feel as you wind deep into its twisted, shaded one-lane roads lined with makeshift gardens and VW vans. My destination sat at the road’s dead end: Red Rock Canyon Park, a dog friendly local preserve where a fire road leads through the riparian canyon to a stunning overlook at Calabassas Peak.

These Dogs are Made for Walking

No matter whether we’re on the barrier islands of Savannah or an urban oasis in Southern California, our dogs Georgia and Brewster know the score. The second those truck tires crunch on gravel road, they’re up in the front seat, crying, pawing at the window—they know it’s time to hit that trail and they’re ready to go NOW.

We pull into a rustic parking lot amid only two other cars, toss the $5 parking fee into the iron ranger, and set up the dusty track. It’s our first foray into the Southern California outdoors. We once slogged swamp trails on the lookout for feral hogs, gators and cottonmouths, but now we’re huffing up arid, red-dirt track with lizards scuttling through the underbrush and hawks soaring overhead on Continue

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For this reason, my go-to photo management software has long been Adobe Lightroom. Whether I’m traveling for work or pleasure, its Swiss-army-knife-like functionality makes it the best photo software for me. I’ve stuck with LR through many iterations, and I’ve been pleasantly suprised as each new software release comes with an ever expanding set of features. Over the years, Lightroom has gone from essentially a library tool to a full-fledged photo processing center that I can use to upload, explore, edit and publish all of my images.

So I experienced a certain amount of nerdy joy when I got an email a couple months back from a Adobe representative, shortly after the release of the new Lightroom 5, asking if I’d like to test out the updated software and get a personal tour of the new features with Lightroom’s product manager Sharad Mangalick. Um…yes please!

And I have to say, from a travel photographer’s perspective, this latest version of Lightroom definitely has me stoked, thanks to a handful of new features. The following are my top three favorite new features in Adobe Lightroom 5. Hopefully you’ll find them as exciting as I do!

Smart Previews

Hands down the coolest thing about LR5 is the new Smart Previews feature. In all the older versions, you needed to have the actual image files with you—either on your computer or an external hard drive—in order to work on the photo. No more! Smart Previews lets you view, edit and publish images without having to bring the actual images on the road with you (which in my case would mean packing many terabytes worth of external hard drives. Any changes you make to a Smart Preview gets automatically applied to the original image when you plug your drive back in after a trip.

As cool as this sounded, I had two questions for Mangalick. First, obviously Smart Previews will be another set of data you need to store on your computer, so how much space will that new collection of Smart Previews take up? “It depends on the original file size, resolution, etc.,” Mangalick explained. “But as an example, 500 original images captured with a 12.1MP Nikon D700 is roughly 6.99 GB. The Smart Previews for those same 500 images are roughly 350 MB—a 96 percent savings in hard disk space.”

My other question was about the resoultion. If a Smart Preview is 4 percent the size of my original RAW file, then clearly it won’t have the same level of detail Continue

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And so, now we’re neck deep in the process of moving the home base from our beloved Savannah to the ethereal shores of Los Angeles. It’s proving quite the adventure already. I drove GG out ahead of time so she could house sit for a friend and get a jump start on the house hunt. In the meantime, I flew back to tie up loose ends here in Georgia, and should make the permanent leap by the end of September.

All of that is the long way of saying that Point Shoot Travel has received only sporadic attention over the last few months. Equally negelected have been my on-assignment travels, which are the source of many of my stories and photos. With all the excitement, I’ve had to regretfully pass on a handful travel opportunities. Among those was a chance to visit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula during the now legendary whale shark season around Isla Mujeres (a total bucket-list adventure that I’ve yet to experience). Next year!

At any rate, Los Angeles awaits, and I fully expect the move to bring with it unprecedented adventure and travel opportunities. How could it not in the land of big-wave surfing, desert dirt biking, movie stars and food trucks. Just thinking about it makes me all giddy!

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Now, I’m not a superstitious type, and I don’t actually believe that inanimate objects can be imbued with the power to cause babies, curses or anything else. But I will say this. I touched that dang rock in December, and within 5 months GG and I were expecting our first child. Quite a coincidence!

While I was there, my guide told us about other travel writers who had also found themselves pregnant within a year of touching the rock. Probably just a case of wishful thinking. At any rate, rock or not, I’ve got the fabulous joy of having a child on the way. So this blog may soon need to change tack into “traveling with kids” territory.

So, if you’re trying to have a kid and need an excuse to go down to the Caribbean for a little extra baby mojo, there’s no reason not to go check out St. Kitts. I’d suggest that a long weekend spent sipping umbrella drinks on Reggae Beach by day, and grooving at the Shiggidy Shack by night would probably be even more effective than the rock!

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I should mention that GG and I have long had it in mind to do a proper cross-country adventure. Her being from Israel means she had never seen much of America beyond the East Coast, as evidenced in part by her seriously misguided opinions on what constitutes a “mountain” (in Israel they call any old hill a mountain, so I figure she ought to get to know the real thing). A couple months ago, we had the opportunity to take a test run when we drove from Savannah to San Antonio for a cousin’s wedding. Thus it was that we found ourselves headed westward in the Little Red Hyundai for a whirlwind road trip. First stop, 36 hours in the Big Easy.

Not only did we take it as an opportunity for a little side trip to New Orleans where I ate my fill of the city’s gustatory offerings, like the indescribably good muffaletta from Cochon Butcher, and GG found herself in antiquing paradise when she finagled a behind the scenes tour of M.S. Rau Antiques. But we also managed to eat our weight in BBQ brisket when we detoured through Lockhart and Austin on the way home. The adventure was short, with a rushed ride to get back home to our respective jobs, but it sparked a serious wanderlust, so it didn’t take us long to devise a plan for more.

And here’s where I get to the point. Simultaneous to wishing we could take time (like, at least a month) to do a proper U.S. road trip, we’ve also been going back and forth for a while about how to best execute our wedding, not an easy task since our people are scattered across the world. Shortly after we returned from Texas it kind of clicked mentally. What if we just combine them? Instead of trying to coordinate everyone coming to us, let’s take the trip we always wanted and take the wedding to them in the process.

And so, that’s what’s fixing to go down. For at least a month we’re going vagabonding, living out of our car and crashing with friends and family as we cruise through 10,000 miles of America the Beautiful. The below map is our intended route, though we reserve the right to change it on a whim. There is no schedule, nothing we HAVE to do, except get married, of course. Continue

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Unpleasant realities abound in many otherwise exotic, exciting destinations. I’ve personally spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea, where I became infatuated by the wild landscapes and “primitive” cultures, but there’s an undercurrent of violence that doesn’t gel with the “happy native” stereotypes that are on display to the majority of travelers here. Recent reports from the country detail a growing proclivity towards witch burnings, usually directed at women who have already been marginalized by their villages. In addition, violent crimes like robbery and rape grow more common as people leave their rural villages, and their remote lands are increasing encroached upon by multinational companies like Exxon-Mobil, which pillage PNG’s abundant oil, minerals and lumber.

Even modern countries aren’t immune. Take Israel for example, where a growing streak of Jewish extremism has led to heartbreaking incidents, like an 8-year-old girl being spit on and called a prostitue for not wearing appropriate clothing and the Women of the Wall, whose protests for equal access at the Wailing Wall are met with hurled insults, rocks and even women being detained by police for infractions like wearing the wrong type of prayer shawl.

I experienced this in my own (very small) way when I visited the Wailing Wall. As a secular gentile, I had no religious intentions as I walked toward the ancient structure. But on approach, I was stopped by a young, armed Israeli soldier who handed me a disposable, nylon yarmulke, the skull caps many Jewish people wear on the top of their heads. Being of American WASP stock, I didn’t want to make a scene, despite my discomfort with wearing religious clothing that I don’t believe in. When I recounted the story later to my Jewish/Israeli fiance, she offered a poignant explanation. “He didn’t give it you because he cared about your religion,” she said. “He gave it to you for your own protection, to keep you from getting hurt by the fanatics.”

Stories like this raise serious questions in my mind. What sort of roles and responsibilities do travelers have in visiting destinations that suffer from serious political, economic or environment turmoil? Is it better to give support and tourism dollars to more stable countries? Or does increased exposure bring with it opportunities for change? I can neither pretend to have answers to these questions, nor Continue

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