Michael, Michelle and I spent an occasionally wet, but mostly beautiful week in Venice in May 2008. I can't imagine there is anywhere on earth quite like Venice, it's an utterly crazy place to build a city and it contains some spectacular riches but also some depressing levels of decay. The islands around the lagoon each have their own personalities and hopping on and off of boat buses never gets old.

A whirlwind 3 day trip to Paris, October 2005. I must have been in a couple of dozen churches and climbed to the top of both the Sacre Couer and L'Arc de Triomphe. Sadly the Eifel Tower was shrowded in fog when I got there so i wasn't really worth going all the way to the top.

My friend Sarah had to travel to Washington DC in September 2008 to do noble, intellectual research in the Library of Congress. I tagged along with the less noble purpose of seeing the sites and taking as many photos of columns as I possibly could. I resisted the temptation to just hunt out notable locations from the West Wing.