The Road to Andorra

 We landed in Toulouse and hit the road, curving through Tour de France battlegrounds, heading south, heading to the mountains - heading to Andorra.

Eiffel Storm

The most photographed structure in the world as photographed by me.  Most travelers pass through the Eiffel Tower at some point in their life.  I took this photo to give the impression that a road could literally pass through the tower, through to a storm on the other side.

Lover's Bridge - Love Locks Paris

In Paris, there is a bridge over the Seine where lovers attach a lock with their marks - initials, a date, or a quote.  After locking onto the bridge, the keys are heaved into the Seine. After a few months, when the locks have completely filled a panel, the panel holding the locks is removed and wood is affixed in place of the panel, until the new panel arrives days later.  Here we have a missing panel with some graffiti scrawled across the wood placeholder.  Soon this will be replaced with a new iron panel, and people will fill it up with locks again.

But a question, where do the locks go after they are removed?

Boos in Paris with a long bearded bonus furmonster

Here we are in front of the gigantic metallic Asparagus.  We had a beautiful day in Paris.  I want to share all 700 pictures that I took, but with this internet connection, it would take 2100 minutes.

Here we have a long bearded Furmonster of the day - Jensen's wiser smaller and more affable cousin

Reflecting on a dark night at the Louvre

The world's most crowded islands

From an island microslum in Colombia to a haute enclave in central Paris, the ten most crowded islands in the world bear scant similarities in class or culture. In fact, every entry in the top ten comes from a different country. But being islands, each shares the common thread of scarcity - whether it be land, resources, or housing. In general, these islands are prophetical microcosms for an overcrowded earth - finite spaces where self sufficiency governs and demand pierces supply.

With the world's population racing higher and higher, and the "megacities club" accepting new members yearly, some day the earth could bear the traits of one of these densely packed islands.

Gallery: Most crowded islands on earth

The world's creepiest abandoned cities

I wrote this piece right before Kristin and I married, almost 2 years ago.  Over a million people read it, and I just noticed that I never published it on goboogo.  So, here it is.  Here is the original run.

Some cities die. The people leave, the streets go quiet, and the isolation takes on the macabre shape of a forlorn ghost-town - crumbling with haunting neglect and urban decay. From Taiwan to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, these abandoned cities lurk in the shadows of civilization. Their histories are carried in hushed whispers and futures stillborn from the day of their collapse. Some have fallen victim to catastrophe while others simply outlive their function. I think we can all agree on one thing - they are all very creepy.

Pripyat
Location: Pripyat, Ukraine - 100km from Kiev
Story: On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl reactor began its tragic meltdown. The incident was a huge blow to the viability of the nuclear energy platform, and still today, the town of Pripyat is an abandoned shell of a city frozen in a 1980's Soviet time-warp. While the failed reactor has been entombed in a an appropriate sounding casing called a "sarcophagus," the area remains unsafe for human life. The town has thrived in one aspect though. Wildlife has returned to the area in droves. Wolves silently hunt among the towering apartment buildings, and boars forage for food in the abandoned amusement park - which strangely opened the day after the reactor explosion in the midst of evacuation.
Abandoned since: 1986

The ten oldest bars and restaurants in the world

I once drank at a pub in Ireland where Vikings had commiserated after invading the Green Isle.  It was older than you or I, our great grandparents, or even the Magna Carta.  It was from the dark ages for sure, and where once Vikings swilled brews, today, tourists eat fish and chips while locals complain about Eurozone politics.  If you look closely enough and kind of squint at the Brazen Head, you can just barely picture middle ages Dublin.  You can almost smell the smoke.  If those walls could talk, they would tell the tale of mankind's ascent into a sophisticated society, for better and worse.  I wondered while I sat at the bar scribbling into my little notebook, how many other really old places are out there?

It is rare for a restaurant or bar to last a very long time - where a long time is determined with a measuring stick notched in decades.  The public houses, inns, and restaurants on this list evade conventional measurement, lasting centuries atop centuries.  These are places where arguments took place about the events we only read about in history class.  The oldest companies in the world are Japanese, but every spot on this list is European.  The Germanic people, it seems, are especially adept at building things that last a very long time. They dominate this list.