Viking Cruise Departure and Days 1-3 Budapest

Posted on 2026/07/10 by Gunther

As I previously reported…we departed home on Sunday June 7 for our trip via Washington DC and Vienna to arrive in Budapest mid morning on Monday. A Viking rep met us at the airport and delivered us to our transport to the hotel…the 4 or 5 star Matild Place hotel…but couldn’t get the keys until 1500 so we wandered off and had lunch. Got email that our room was ready so we headed there and got in an hour nap before heading off to dinner. Connie had made reservations for The Duchess…named after Her Imperial and Royal Highness Maria Klotild  (she was actually the Archduchess but whatever). The hotel previously existed but she asked the original architect of her palace to create a rooftop establishment where she could mingle with her equals away from the common people. 

I gotta tell ya…it’s a pretty nice bar. The hotel is about 2 blocks from the Danube, we arrived at 1800 and stayed until after 2000 to watch the sunset. Had a nice bottle of Hungarian white wine and then split an appetizer of Ramon de Serrano ham with Parmesan and capers then had a cocktail instead of a second bottle of wine. Our original plan was to have the Creme Brûlée for dessert but (a) we were full and (b) the hotel had left us some nice chocolates we decided to have instead. We stopped by the Lidl down the street (sort of an upscale 7-11) to get a bottle of something to drink on and went through the self checkout line since the people checkout line was long. Unfortunately after scanning our purchase and trying to pay we discovered all the instructions were in Hungarian which is impossible to sort out by seeing what English word the Hungarian one reminds you of so one of the staff came over and  helped us out. The local currency is the Hungarian Forint with an exchange rate of about 300 to the dollar…but if you drop the last two digits of the actual price and divide the remainder by 3 you get a pretty close dollar price. As is typical in a capital that is also a tourist destination one pays Disneyland prices…our dinner above was $170 but that did include a standard 15% tip and 15% VAT…but it was still on the expensive side.

Looking west towards the Elisabeth Bridge named after Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary. At the far side is Gellért Hill which I’ll talk about in a bit. The Citadel is on top of the hill. The church you can see the back of on the right side is the oldest church in the city…locally known as the Inner City Parish Church and officially the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The church dates from the 1100s and is on the site of the Roman era fortress Contra-Aquincum…and the ruins of that fort are visible through a glass portion in the floor. The bridge itself dates from the late 1800s and the original was destroyed as German forces retreated during WWII with the new bridge being built in the 1960s on the same site and using the original bridge piers to save on the cost. And while you can’t see it in this photo our ship the Viking Egdir is moored just on the other side of the buildings at the left of this image.

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Gunther and Kara posing for us amid dinner and wine. Dinner was excellent.

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And watching the sun go down.

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A couple of examples of the city architecture…most of the buildings in downtown look like this.

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The Matild Hotel, the Duchess Bar is on the far side of the roof towards the river.

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We got back to the hotel, ate our chocolates, had a shower and crashed into bed some 40ish ours after getting up on Sunday…and had a pretty good nights sleep.

Tuesday we had breakfast at the hotel (included in the price) and once again discovered that eggs in Europe/UK taste way better than at home…and the pastries are better as well. Connie ate fruit and Neil had some scrambled eggs with bacon and sausage from the hot buffet followed by a creme brûlée Danish that was probably 1,000 calories all by itself with the butter and honey and brûlée in the middle. After that we headed off on a walkabout.

Our original thought was to climb to the top of Gellért Hill to see the fortress so we started across the Liberty Bridge over the Danube that separates Buda on the West Bank and Pest on the east bank. In times gone by they were two different cities but merged in 1873 along with Obuda (Old Buda which was the original Roman settlement just north of Buda) to become Budapest. The merger came during the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 when Hungary gained greater independence and wanted a capital city that rivaled other European capitals. What is now the Liberty Bridge was opened as the Elisabeth Bridge (Erzsébet híd in Hungarian which is a Uralic language originating on the east side of the Urals in what is now Russia) in 1849 which was the longest suspension bridge in the world for 23 years.Buda was originally the historic royal and administrative center while Pest was the commercial and economic center with Obuda being the old Roman era settlement. However…the hill is about 500 feet higher than the river and although it has steps up we decided it was too much of an effort in the heat to go up to the Citadella (fort) on top), especially as our first excursion on the cruise on Thursday will take us on a bus to the top. On the way back across the bridge we spotted a Viking ship moored south of the bridge and on closer examination it was the Viking Egdir which we will board on Wednesday.

Viking Egdir

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Saint Gellért and the waterfall beneath his statue at the west end of the bridge.

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Monument to Empress Elisabeth

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The front side of the Inner City Parish Church as we returned across the bridge.

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Having given up on that…we strolled a bit through the park at the west side of the bridge before heading back across and waling a bit down the Vaci Utca (street in Hungarian) which is a shop[ping and pedestrian mall sort of area. We happened upon the Rubik Museum and Gift shop…the Rubik’s Cube (originally Magic Cube was invented in 1974 as a teaching tool to help students understand 3D movement and spacial relationships by a Hungarian named Erno Rubik (a professor teaching in Budapest) and it was renamed to Rubik’s cube and distributed internationally in 1980. 

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We told the young man in the museum/store we would make him famous.

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And a portrait of Erno Rubik made…naturally…of Rubiks cubes.

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We turned around and returned to the hotel having had a total walk of about 2.5 miles and we were tired so we spent the rest of the afternoon resting  before heading out to Jack Doyle’s Irish Pub for dinner. It was carefully selected by the DLETC from our available options because the picture on their website showed that they serve Kilkenny Ale and Green Spot Irish Whiskey both of which are among our favorites. Kilkenny is an amber ale but it pours and has the mouth feel and head of Guinness except in a lighter brew.However, on our arrival there at the 1700 opening time we were the only 2 customers because the kitchen is closed on Tuesday during the summer. We had a pint of Kilkenny and a Green Spot neat. Then we headed back to what was our originally planned dinner spot, the Pointer Pub which is a British pub. Turned out they had Kilkenny as well so we had another pint along with the most excellent fish and chips along with a side of onion rings that were both the best we’ve had in a very long time. After dinner…we had a glass of Pàlinka which is Hungarian fruit brandy. We had peach and plum based versions since the most popular apricot version wasn’t available so we’ll try that later on hopefully. 

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After dinner it was a very short walk back to the hotel (across the street) then off to bed after figuring out the next day’s schedule which essentially will be embarkation day onboard the ship which will be home the next two weeks.

After breakfast on Wednesday we boarded the bus for the transfer to Viking Egdir and we really could have walked to the ship in half the time we were on the bus. Because of spring river flooding there is a lower embankment which routinely floods and an upper one that rarely does. Because of one way streets and limited access to the embankment we drove about 5 miles through mid day downtown traffic to cover the maybe 1/3 of a mile actual distance to the ship. We got checked in and adjourned to the Aquavit Lounge for a glass of wine.

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And eventually were notified that luggage was delivered to our cabin 201 which was the farthest forward cabin on the starboard side of the ship…we had reserved the Veranda cabins which are only on that side and actually having the reception area on one side really cut down the noise levels although the cabins were so well insulated that we heard almost nothing when we were in the cabin.

We unpacked everything and got settled for the cruise…followed by Happy Hour, dinner, and a couple of welcome aboard/orientation/safety briefings before heading off to bed. It has been a pleasant time wandering the city but now it is time for cruisin’.

Cyas.

Posted in Photography, Travel, Viking Cruise | Leave a comment

Slight Change of Plans

Posted on 2026/07/05 by Gunther

Well…it’s Independence Day Weekend and I gotta report to ya a slight change of plans regarding blog posts and images from our Viking River Cruise.

See…I worked my claws off on the trip to write most of the words for each day and stop of the trip leaving me with just waiting on Neil to process the photos and heck, there ain’t really that many of them, less than 500 or so which is way less than the 35,000 from Africa and Costa Rica trips. However…that dadgum slacker ain’t done any yet and I need to post something so I’m going to digress today into some stats and general overview of the cruise.

The cruise itself was scheduled for 15 days and we arrived in Budapest Hungary a couple days early just in case there were airline scheduling issues and to get over the jet lag and we had a nice day and a half on our own in the city before boarding the boat. From there the first stop was in Vienna Austria and I’ll get to all the details of our various stops and excursions in later posts so I’ll just hit the highlights today.

We were originally scheduled to said on the Viking Gymir but the river was closed for a few days earlier in the month by low water between Budapest and Vienna trapping Gymir on the other side and Viking Egdir on our side of the closure. The already in progress cruises ahead of ours just exchanged passengers via bus and then headed back the way they came…so the previous cruise westbound left Budapest and stopped before the closure to move their passengers to Gymir on the other side and Gymir’s passengers transferred to Egdir for the last couple days of their cruise. The ships are identical so the swap was relatively simple.

Viking longships as they’re called were specifically designed for the rivers and locks they need to transit…they’re 443 feet long with a beam of 37.5 feet, a draft of 6.2 feet which can be increased to 6.6 by flooding some ballast tanks and they have a height above the waterline of 20 feet. These dimensions were carefully specified as many of the 67 locks they pass through between Budapest and Amsterdam are only 39.4 feet wide leaving a mere 2 feet of clearance for the very long and narrow ship to transit through the locks. In addition…there are numerous low bridges which means that the wheelhouse located on the sun deck has to be lowered below the height of the deck to get under them and sometimes there is less than a foot of clearance. Passenger load is 190 with a crew of 53. Here’s a shot from the Viking website of Gymir.

As you can imagine…what with narrow clearances for the locks, rocks in the river and currents maneuvering such a long narrow ship is hard. On the picture above the bow is to the right side and on the sun deck you can see the retractable wheelhouse about 1/4 of the way back and then the open air sun deck aft of that (all of the canopies also get lowered for bridge transits. On the next deck down…the forward portion with the black windows is the Aquavit Lounge which extends out onto the open air bow, then the aft third is passenger cabins. The next deck down has the restaurant with the black windows and more cabins aft of that…our cabin was the forward most one on the starboard (right) side and had a small balcony with 2 chairs and a table where we could sit and watch the world go by. The next deck down is mostly under the waterline with each cabin having a small window at the very top of the exterior hull so they get no view. 

The ships are propelled by electrical motors and have diesel generators for powering those. There are 4 propulsion pods about 8 or 10 feet long at the stern that rotate 360 degrees and have a screw on both ends and a 5th pod at the bow…these make turning the ship easy and it can spin in place if needed (and it was several times). 

The service, food, and bar arrangements are pretty spectacular. We paid the extra for the Silver Spirits package so that instead of a single glass of house wine with lunch and dinner and pay as you go for more or better wine or cocktails you get as much of both as you desire including the better than house wine selections. Breakfast was pretty standard but lunches and dinners remained great throughout the trip, each had 3 or 4 always the same selections like chicken, steak, and salmon but there were also appetizers, soups, entrees, and desserts which were local to whatever town or region we happened to be passing through that day. Everything was cooked in way too much butter and between that, the wine, and the ridiculously delicious desserts we both gained 6 pounds or so over the 17 days and are now working to get those back off with our more normal diet. Even skipping the appetizer most of the time and only eating half of the entree course we were overstuffed twice daily.

We had 3 or 4 sailings that were all during daytime so one could see various sights, castles, and whatnot along the river. Our trip was named the Grand European Tour from Budapest to Amsterdam, here is a map of the overall route.

As you can see we started heading upstream on the Danube River then turned north into the Main Danube canal. On the canal we passed highest lock you can reach from the ocean (1,332 feet above sea level at the Hilpoltstein Lock which actually has a lift of 81 feet, one of the highest lock lifts in Germany) and then continued downstream in the anal, then into the Main (pronounced Mine) river thence on downstream on the Rhine river before heading north from Kinderdjik in another canal to Amsterdam where we disembarked.

The remainder of the sailings were mostly overnight so as to meet the cities where we stopped for excursions. 

The only real issue we had was the weather…we expected highs in the 70s based on historical averages but as it turned out Europe was in the middle of a terrible heat wave in June of 2026 so most days the high was in the 90s which made things pretty darned uncomfortable, pretty similar to what we have in Florida at home. However…we just went slowly on our excursions although we did skip a couple, one because Neil wasn’t feeling well and a second because we were exhausted from the days before (I’ll talk about that when we get to Vienna and it was just another cathedral and market anyway.

So…what was our overall impression of the trip and would we do it again?

Connie had a most excellent time since we got to see Vienna and hear Mozart music at a concert in the city where he lived and worked. Neil actually had a pretty good time as well…better than he expected to have…he originally was mostly was doing a trip that she wanted to do and he figured he would have an OK time but a nice vacation…and he was pleasantly surprised by how good of a time he had overall. As to whether we would do another one…well, very likely. He’s not interested in an ocean cruise in the slightest and most of the other European river cruises either have a lot of bus transfers during them or visit ports we already saw on the Grand Tour. However…there are a couple that aren’t duplicative so we’re taking it under advisement for now.

That’s about it for an overview of our trip…so I’m gonna hand the keyboard over to Neil for the rest of the post.

I know Connie doesn’t like politics on the blog so I’m not going to talk about particular issues  but I do have a couple thoughts this Independence Day weekend regarding the political unrest in the US. What I believe is that the political climate is primarily encouraged by the far fringes of both left and right and the media that either supports just one side as well as flaming the other side for their beliefs. Those fringe people do not represent a majority of Americans but they’re the ones that vote in and control the primary elections so that we the voters who are mostly in the center left to center right end up with no viable choice in the election beyond voting for whoever is the least bad. 

As you know there have been a bunch of SOTUS decisions over the past few weeks…and both sides have gotten their share of wins but despite that all I’ve been seeing in the media is how partisan and biased the court ruled and those criticisms have been from both sides. Compromise in today’s politics has become a death knell for your future prospects as an elected official and that is just a darned shame.

I really wish we could get back to the days when the two parties could agree so that each side got some of what they wanted but not all and thus moved the country forwards. And I really wish that media would stop misreporting the facts, chopping up sound bites to get an inflammatory quote and just get back to reporting the facts without editorial comment. People my age remember the days of Walter Cronkite who never, not once, let his personal opinion color what he reported…as his famous last line was “and that’s the way it is”. Years after he retired from CBSd it came out that he was personally wildly progressive in his political views…but he never let that influence his recitation of the facts or the words and phrasing he used. Today…journalists like him are practically extinct and that’s as I said a darned shame.

I’ve promised the bear I’ll try to get to the photos as soon as I can.

Interesting things found on the net.

It’s a simple animal question really:-)

Cyas.

Posted in Food, Travel, Viking Cruise | Leave a comment

And We’re Back Home

Posted on 2026/06/25 by Gunther

Sorry about the time between posts but we departed on June 7 for a vacation in Europe (Viking river cruise as detailed below) and returned yesterday June 24. Since we’re no longer in the RV I don’t post when we are leaving town ahead of time since it’s like advertising for the break in artists…but we did make preliminary arrangements with the fellow that fixed our lanai screen to come and install our storm shutters if necessary but given its early in the storm season we figured it was unlikely to be needed although Neil did bring in the lighter lanai things to the garage.

We’ve got pictures and I’ve already written most of the word parts of the blog posts so expect more posts detailing our trip in a little while…but today I’m just going over the getting there part of the trip.

We also tried out a new go to the airport thing. Normally we drive and park in long term parking at $11 per day…that requires a shuttle ride both to the terminal with your luggage and another one on return. Connie happened to notice a fellow St. Therese parish member who advertised on the bulletin that he does airport rides to Fort Myers, Punta Gorda, and Miami. The price to and from the airport here including a $20 tip was just a bit more than half of what parking would have been…and he drops off and picks up at the terminal so it’s a much easier time, particularly on the return trip.

We had an 0545 pickup for our flight to Dulles near Washington DC, then switched to business class via Austrian Airlines overnight to Vienna Austria and then another short flight to Budapest Hungary arriving around 1000. Viking arranged our flights and we included a 2 day pre cruise add on to both give us a bit of time to recover from jet lag (6 hour time difference from EDT) and to cover any flight issues that would have caused a delay. 

Viking had an employee there to meet us at the exit from baggage claim/passport control/customs to take us to a van which whisked us into the city to the centrally located Matild Palace Hotel which is under the Marriott umbrella…and it was pretty darned nice…at least 4 and maybe 5 stars. The only drawback was that it was about 1045 and checkin wasn’t until 1500. So the hotel stored our luggage and we wandered around the neighborhood of the hotel and had lunch, getting an email that our room was available about 1330 so we went back and got checked in. After an afternoon nap we headed out to dinner at the rooftop on the hotel where we had a nice bottle of wine and some appetizers for dinner before heading to bed early as we were in the 40ish hours since we got up Sunday morning time frame. We arrived at the bar at 1800 and stayed until about 2000 for the sunset. The bar is named the Duchess and was designed and built for Archduchess Maria Klotild as a meeting place for the city’s elite where they could meet and party away from the peasants. It was designed during what was locally named the Decadence Movement…and yeah, it was decadent. There is no street entrance, it has a private elevator inside the hotel, and is still reservation only although one no longer has to be elite, just have a reservation. It is about 2 blocks from the river and the Elisabeth Bridge named after Elisabeth of Bavaria (nicknamed Sisi)…she was the wife of Franz Joseph 1 which made her the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary and was instrumental and well liked by the Hungarians during the negotiations for the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 which established the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Dinner was a bit on the pricey side…but then it was the rooftop bar at the most famous hotel in the capital of Hungary.

Tuesday we had a self walking tour of about 2.5 miles, walking across the nearby bridge from the Pest side of town to the Buda side of town…they were actually 2 different cities but in 1873 joined into a single city (along with Óbuda or Old Buda which was the original Roman era settlement of Aquincum) to form Budapest. Buda is the older, hillier administrative and royal side of town while Pest is more the commercial/business side and that is mostly still true today. Tuesday evening we headed out to an Irish pub but it turned out their kitchen was closed so we ended up at the British Pointer Pub directly across the street from the hotel.

Wednesday morning we had another excellent breakfast at the hotel restaurant (breakfasts were included in the extension) before packing up for the bus transfer to our ship which turned out to be less than a quarter mile as the crow flies but was a 3-4 mile bus ride as we had to get first onto the upper embankment (which rarely floods in the spring) and then onto the lower embankment which floods about 2/3 of the time but not usually excessively damaging as the embankment businesses and infrastructure was built with flooding in mind.

Our ship was originally scheduled to be the Viking Gymir which is a 443 foot long 190 passenger ship but earlier in the month (or maybe late in May but it was never clear) the section of the Danube between Budapest and Vienna was closed due to low water level trapping the Viking Gymir upstream of the closed section and our eventual (and identical) Viking Egdir…the previous cruises they had to swap passengers via bus to get around the closed section. We boarded the Egdir around 1100 or so and unpacked our luggage for the duration…making Wednesday Day 1 of the scheduled 15 day cruise although it was day 4 of our trip and I will stick to our day numbers for the upcoming posts. The remaining portion of Wednesday was devoted to Happy Hour, dinner, a safety and orientation briefing in the evening and then some light entertainment before going to bed.

Next up…another day in Budapest on excursions seeing the city via bus and walking tour but that’s another post.

No images today because (a) it was only traveling through various airports and (b) Neil hasn’t processed anything yet, it’s our first day back and we’re recovering from jet lag but we do need to run down and get some groceries.

Cyas.

Posted in Travel, Viking Cruise | Leave a comment

Road Trip to Chicago

Posted on 2026/05/25 by Gunther

Well, we’re back from a quick (Monday to Saturday) 2,800 mile road trip to Chicago. We had tickets to the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony performed by the Chicago Symphony which we’ve heard in years past a couple of times on Thursday. When it got to be time to make plane reservations for the trip it was in the middle of that whole TSA shutdown/slowdown/whatever you want to call it resulting in extremely long lines and it wasn’t clear that TSA would shut down entirely making flights impossible. So we converted it into a driving trip with a stop for a day and a half in Bardstown KY to tour a couple of distilleries we had not been to on previous trips.

I can tell ya the first day was horrible. GPS routed us through Atlanta and we essentially lost 3 hours of time getting around the wrecks and construction which then pushed us into rush hour before we got out the other side and stopped a bit short of Dalton GA for the night. As a result…we’ve made the decision that…like Orlando…we are never going through Atlanta again unless that is our actual destination. As a going through the city thing though…not gonna happen.

Tuesday we pressed on to Bardstown and got checked in. Connie had scheduled 1 distillery tour for that afternoon and another two the next day. The afternoon one was Preservation distillery where we just had a tasting and no tour, and afterwards we headed back to our hotel and dinner. Wednesday we did the Willet distillery in the morning for both tour and tasting but in an unusual thing instead of the tasting at the end of the tour it was distributed through the tour as we progressed from one section to another. We then had lunch at the on-site bar and restaurant and then went over to the relatively new Bardstown Bourbon Experience which turned out to be a decent tasting but was really a much more Las Vegas attraction than most distillery tours are. All of the images below are from Willet except for the glass fronted rickhouse (where they age the bourbon) which is at the Experience. We had excellent dinners at two locations in Bardstown…the Talbot Tavern where we celebrated Neil’s birthday years ago and then at The Rickhouse Restaurant and Lounge…both were pretty darned good.

Thursday we pressed on to Chicago arriving mid afternoon, got checked into our hotel and then had dinner and the concert. Dinner was an experience as places were really crowded and we ended up at Miller’s Pub and got the last non reserved table in the joint. Dinner was good and it was a short walk to the concert hall and then back to the hotel.

Friday and Saturday we headed home with the possibility that we would run over into Sunday if Neil got tired driving or we ran into serious traffic. We figured out a better route home…down through Nashville then Decatur AL and down through Dothan AL to Marianna FL where we got onto I-10 then on I-75 to home. There was no traffic in any of the medium sized cities we passed through and while a few hundred miles were on non interstate highways they were still 4 lane and 60-65 speed limits so we sailed right along. Stopped overnight just north of Decatur and since we had no traffic issues made it home after a stop in Sarasota for dinner at the place we normally eat after Sarasota Symphony concerts for a break.

Other than that…it’s pretty much situation normal here although we did go straight from FL winter to summer with no spring in between. Temps are in the 90s most days now with humidity and lows still in the 70s overnight so Neil’s getting out for his bicycle rides as early as he can and will continue to do that until the fall.

A few shots from the trip…Neil just took a single small body and 1 lens as it wasn’t really a photo trip and just used that and his iPhone for the shots.

Texas longhorns at Willet

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Mash in process of fermentation

The main still at Willet…there’s a secondary column still but it’s a a building with no space for tours. Most of the output at the distillery comes rom this one and they sell one bourbon in a replica bottle based on this still.

Pano of the bar at Willet where we had lunch

The glass front rickhouse at the Bardstown Experience. Most rick houses  are wooden with windows that get opened at certain times of the year and typically (although not at Willet) barrels get moved between racks and floors as they age. Willet never moves them.

One of the unique barrels that Willet uses for some of their product. It’s made of a combination of both oak and cherry barrel staves and hence the contents cannot be sold as bourbon since that requires only new charred oak barrels. The other bourbon requirements are at least 51% corn, made in the USA, distilled to no more than 160 proof, barreled at no more than 125 proof, aged 3 years in new charred oak barrels, bottled at lest 80 proof, and contain flavoring or coloring ingredients except what came from the barrels. If it doesn’t meet those requirements it can be whiskey or corn whiskey or whiskey finished with cherry wood. Since the barrels cannot be reused for bourbon they do not get wasted. They’re sold to Irish whiskey distillers, wineries, breweries, rum distillers and most barrels get used 3 to 5 times before getting discarded or sold for planters or decorative elements. We think that the whiskey sold in the bottle modeled on the still is aged in these barrels.

All in all…it was a great trip although it did take us 3 or 4 days to recover from the long days driving…but the TSA lines were still long the week before last and getting a couple days of doing Fun Stuff© and some excellent dinners is always good.

Interesting things found on the net

How things have changed

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I had another one about a woman up in Saskatchewan getting attacked by a moose and her son ended up killing it. The original article from people.com in an attempt to be helpful I guess showed a picture of a moose…but it was actually an elk and not a moose at all. Unfortunately…the article’s been updated after two comments about it being an elk and not a moose so I can’t show you the picture. Neil had just emailed himself the link to the article before so I’ll have to have Neil grab the images as well next time.

Cyas.

Posted in Organ Symphony, Travel | Leave a comment

More Catching Up The Year

Posted on 2026/04/26 by Gunther

Well…a bit over 3 weeks since my last post and while I coulda blamed it on Neil for no processing images for me they’ve actually been in the export folder for over 2 of those weeks so it ain’t his fault. I coulda blamed it on us being just extraordinarily busy…and I guess that’s part of it at least for the first couple of weeks. Easter week fell in there and that’s got a lot of choir commitments and then it was the final MasterSingers rehearsal and concert of the year but the rest of it I just have to put down to I couldn’t find my round tuit I guess.

Anyways…we do have a couple of things coming up…the Florida Ladies of Elks (FLOE) RV rally which will be up in Ocala and since we don’t have an RV any longer there’s a rental thing we’re going to do for that. Then we have a Saint-Säens Organ Symphony concert up in Chicago 

Round the homestead…nothing really going on there either. It’s starting to get warm but we’ve been mostly able to get the windows open at last part of the day most days…but it won’t be long until we’re pretty much shut up for the summer…our least favorite time of the year here in Florida as we much prefer having open windows and getting the breeze.

The photos that Neil processed for me are from a trip up to the Venice Rookery he took in March…it’s about an hour or so drive up there and there’s a small Audubon Society pond that gets pretty tremendous numbers of nesting wading birds this time of the year. It is situated just off of US-41 in Venice and is a medium sized pond with a viewing area on the east side so you get that nice morning light if you get there just about sunrise which was what he did.

Here’s a google satellite view of the pond…it’s the one on the left with the island in the middle…strangely enough the one on the right side with the island in the middle gets pretty much no nests established. The available nesting island is about 2/3 of the size it was before the hurricanes a couple years back, As you can see…it’s a really short walk from the parking log to the viewing area and while one can walk completely around to the other side that is only a viable spot in the afternoon as everything is backlit and silhouetted in the morning and the island is closer to the east side anyway. US-41 is a couple hundred yards to the north of this shot.

Glossy Ibis

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Great Egret coming in for a landing

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This is a Swallow Tailed Kite hatching that has not fledged yet. Kites are raptors and despite coming here for going on 15 years or so now this is the first non water bird he’s ever seen nesting there. It’s not a very good image as it never turned towards him and you can see it’s about 2/3 of the way from the hatching downy feathers to the juvenile plumage.

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Since that’s a lousy shot here are a couple of adult shots from an earlier outing down at Corkscrew and from our back yard. Kites normally diet almost exclusively on insects as you can see in the flight one from breakfast in its talons. However they do catch small rodents and other critters to feed the young as bringing back enough insects to help it grow would be hard. Kites are medium sized about 25 inches in length and with a 3.5-4.5 foot wingspan. How they got their name seems pretty obvious once you see one. We have one that hunts in our neighborhood that we know of but it is not an everyday sighting.

Glossy Ibis launching

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Cormorants

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A different Glossy Ibis…there were probably 200 or 250 birds on the island when he was there.

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Great Egret

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Red Winged Blackbird

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Great Blue Heron that just missed a catch

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Brewer’s Blackbird

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Black Crowned Night Heron arriving

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Juvenile Black Crowned Night Heron…obviously it recently fledged since it’s not mature enough to mate and is still learning the ropes from its parents.

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Glossy Ibis with some building material

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Black Crowned again

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Male Great Egret with it’s courtship display working on attracting the ladies

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Anhinga hatchling still getting it’s flight feathers

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All in all a pretty decent outing although not as many nests as in years past but then there’s a lot less island to nest on now.

Interesting things found on the net

Sign discussing what dogs are allowed inside.

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People always say things like ‘go to the fork in the road’ when you ask them for directions…finally found it.

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Interesting rathole about Japan that Neil went down (well, he at least thought it was interesting). The country has over 14,000 islands stretching over a length of almost 2,000 miles but there are 4 main islands of which Honshu (which contains Tokyo, Kyoto and most of the other cities you’ve heard of) and it is about 800 miles out of the 2,000 total the country stretches over. Total land area in the country is about 125 million of which about 100 million live on Honshu. The thing that took him down the rathole was the image below…the red area contains 50% of the entire population. Having spent a couple months there back in the 80s as part of his tour at the NROTC unit at Auburn University…he can vouch for that as it is just incredibly crowded. 

An interesting side note…the gap you an see between the north end of Honshu and the southern end of Hokaido at the upper right is the Tsugaro Strait with the Sea of Japan on the west side and the Pacific on the east side of the strait. Back on his second submarine when they were in WestPac they had spent some time in the Sea of Japan but then got orders to go to Yokosuka for a port visit. The only problem was that the time frame to get there required them to run at the maximum speed the ship could go in order to make it on time. In the open ocean that would be no problem at all but the Tsugaro Strait is only a dozen miles wide maximum and most of it is relatively shallow…but they needed to go fast. It turned out that there is a very narrow strip more or less in the middle of the strait that is about 2 miles wide and more than 600 feet deep so what they ended up up doing was staying as shallow as they could be while still making maximum speed and they ran down the more than 600 feet deep section. As long as the ship’s depth and the ship to bottom number remained more than 600 feet they knew they didn’t have to worry about the bottom. Their transit happened on the evening and mid watches and he stayed in the control room with the fathometer (depth finder) manned and running in continuous all the way through. Luckily their inertial navigation system was very accurate and they augmented it with fixing the ship position every 15 minutes or so using the bottom contours on the chart. An exciting time to be sure but as long as the number remained more than 600 nothing to really worry about but he had pre-instructed the Officer of the Deck that if he was told go slow and go shallow to do that immediately if not sooner just in case they got out of the patch following the bottom of the canyon between the islands. Going that fast in relatively shallow water with turns every 20 minutes or so as he recalls to follow the deep water was definitely a nerve wracking 10 hours or whatever it was.

And the reason that over half the population lives in that red area…the rest of the country is pretty much mountains and of the half in the red area over half of that lives in what is known as the Kanto Plain which is the wider area at far right containing Tokyo, Yokohama, and Yokosuka.

Fukushima which is where the earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdown happened some years back is on the east side of Honshu in the bay just southeast of the little point that juts southward (right about the middle of the map from top to bottom on the east (right) side) of the island.

Cyas.

Posted in Blast From The Past, Critters, Photography, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Ok, Let’s Catchup the Year So Far

Posted on 2026/04/02 by Gunther

Well…I finally got all the Botswana images posted so let’s see what else has been going on this year…after all it’s into April and I do have a couple of outings that Neil went on to post.

First up…what’s happened lately

Since my last post we’ve had a couple concerts. First up was a Fort Myers Community concert which featured one of the younger brothers of Winton Marsalis and his band…they played a variety of music that was amazingly enough since they are from New Orleans not really too jazzy. We’ve never heard the Stars and Strips Forever by John Phillip Sousa where the solo piccolo part at the end was played by a tuba…but now we have and it was pretty dared good.

Then we had Connie’s performance with the MasterSingers of the Civil War Cantata…the director’s great grandfather was a soldier in the Civil War and left a diary which got turned into choral peace. Yeah…it’s one of those vanity pieces and it might or might not actually get much traction but the MasterSingers had the world premiere. We’ve been to a total of 3 ‘world premiers’ over the past 30 years or so and this was the first one that actually didn’t suck…so maybe it will have some legs. It was mostly an orchestral piece with a tenor narrating some of the words from his diary along with some solo tenor singing and some sections by the chorus. Connie thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread…Neil thought it was better than average and it was a pleasant evening listening to the piece.

As I may have reported last time…Neil ended up needing new hearing aids and after a week and a half (and $7200) he’s gotta admit that the tech available in 2026 is way better than it was in 2017. He’s still getting used to the capabilities in the new ones but admits it’s overall an improvement. The old ones had basically reached end of life.

Connie had her 6 month followup with her breast surgeon and all is well on that front…she’ll do semi-annual mammograms for the next couple of years but there’s no indication of anything abnormal so it looks like her surgery and the radiation cured her. She’s still not happy about the less than perfect shape of her chest and is still having some intermittent soreness but they told her that’s expected after the radiation she had.

A this week has been (and will continue to be through Easter) the choir week from hell. She’s got multiple things to sing for at the choir and also has been working on some end of the fiscal year things for the Ladies of elks so she’s been pretty busy. But…after tomorrow, Saturday, and Easter Sunday things will slack off from the hectic pace she’s had…and she’s really, really glad about that.

So…we’re all caught up on happenings so let’s see some images.

Back in January…Connie had a day of Elks meetings up at Umatilla Elks camp (near Orlando) and he went up with her the day before. After a nice Mexican dinner he dropped her off the next morning at the camp for her meetings and headed off to Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive to see what he might find It was early in the breeding season but he still got some halfway decent shots so here we go with them.

Almost all of these individuals are in breeding plumage, I’ll give some details as we get to them.

Little Blue Heron…the reddish portions on the neck are the breeding feathers…this is (probably) a male.

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An osprey having breakfast after some fishing.

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Common yellow throat…a small songbird.

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Great Blue Heron…the breast feathers are the breeding plumage in this species.

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Snowy Egret…the drooping feathers are the key here.

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Tricolor Heron…not sure what their breeding plumage looks like.

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Gray Headed Swamp Hen.

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Male Red Winged Blackbird.

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Another Little Blue Heron with the reddish mating attractions…probably a male.

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Mature Black Crowned Night Heron.

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Overall…a decent outing but not really anything spectacular. He went on another outing to the Venice Rookery a week or so back that I’ll post next time.

Interesting things found on the net.

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HEIF Image 10.

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And finally…I want to recommend something for you. There is this guy named Randy Cassingham who is one of the oldest internet publishers and he has  weekly newsletter (both free and a dollar a week versions) called This is True. He takes news stories and rewrites them in a humorous make you think vein and I highly recommend that you take a look at his site thisistrue.com…he’s excellent. He and his bride used to live in Colorado but are now living full time on a cruise ship traveling the world. Back in 2018 or 2019 Neil and Connie met them near their home and had a nice evening with them. He’s a great guy, writes a terrific weekly commentary on the human condition and I can highly recommend him;

What I didn’t realize until recently is that he is actually a pretty talented artist as well. His web universe includes a bunch of things and one of them is named Randy’s Random where he posts whatever strikes his fancy. One of the recent ones Neil was surprised at because he didn’t realize Randy was an artist as well as a darned good writer…he is amazed by how so few pen strokes evoke the image of a couple dancing happily away. Good onya Randy.

Here is a a recent post…
The Last Dance…he created the artwork for a dancer friend of his and then later on added the Cuban saying “They can’t take away want aI’ve already danced” which basically talks about remembering the good past from a departed friend. Neil was struck by both the really outstanding minimalist drawing and the sentiment…which is why I’m recommending that you subscribe to his newsletter and the Randy’s Random page…he has always been impressed by Randy’s skill at writing and has been a subscriber to the This is True newsletter for decades. Check it out…you’ll be glad you did.

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Photography, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Botswana Trip Day 11 Part 2

Posted on 2026/03/18 by Gunther

And finally…we’re at the end of the Botswana trip photos. I dunno what I’ll be able to post next but he’s got a few photos on his memory card so hopefully he might do them soon. He’s thinking about heading up to the Venice Rookery in the next week or so to catch the tail end of the breeding season up there…but with all that’s going on with life he’s not sure it will work. He’s going to negotiate with Connie and see if (a) she wants to go with him and (b) what day might work. It won’t be this week…she’s in the midst of Civil War Cantata stress as I’ll discuss in a bit.

Since my last post…we’ve done pretty much not much. They finished filing their tax return and submitted it…and all that’s left is to figure out how much to pay in estimated taxes for the dividends and capital gains from their portfolio with Cassaday and Company…they’ve been managing their assets for going on 2 decades now. They always pay estimated taxes since they have no idea how much they’ll make from the investment accounts and it’s always a guessing game with Neil trying to figure it out. And it will get even worse next year in 2027 since they’ll be at the age where they’ll start having to take Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from their IRAs but at least Cassaday can do withholding for federal taxes on those. They can reduce the RMDs by making Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) from their IRAs and that’s their current plan.

Connie’s having a really hard week…with Mastersingers rehearsals every night this week except Thursday. They’re preparing a world premier piece…it turns out that the director of the Mastersingers great grandfather (or maybe great-great, I dunno) fought in the Civil War and kept a diary. Matt (the director) found this diary recently and commissioned a choral piece using the words from the diary from a well known (well, well known at least in the choral world anyway) composer. They’ve been rehearsing it the last couple of months and the composer is in town this week to oversee the rehearsals and make changes based on what he’s heard. From what he’s told the chorus…he’s plenty happy with their professionalism and singing ability. They’ll be doing the world premier Saturday and Neil will attend and there is a second performance on Sunday at a different venue. Neil’s heard it from her practicing and from attending the rehearsals while her car was in the shop for the rear hatch leak and it’s a pretty decent piece…much better than most contemporary pieces which tend to be atonal and not really sound like music to either him or her. There are a couple of soloists (tenor and a mezzo soprano) along with the chorus and orchestra. I’ll let you know how it sounds on Saturday in my next post.

They’ve got a Fort Myers Community Concert tomorrow though…it’s a performance by Brandon Marsalis’s group…he’s the younger brother of Wynton who is one of the better trumpet soloist these days…although Winton has largely quit doing classical music in favor of jazz. The family is from New Orleans which explains the jazz influence and both he and his two younger brothers are in the music performance biz. 

Neil had to break down and buy new hearing aids after 9 years…one of his broke and isn’t repairable. The good news is that the firmware is much better now so he’ll be able to hear better…the bad news as I reported last time is they cost a lot. No worries though…it’s all under control. He will pick up the new ones Friday evening which he’s happy about as he has been hard to heard things with only one working the past week orson.

OK, let’s get on to the final images from Botswana and then the wrap-up of his trip and some thought on African safaris.

African Darter…pretty much the same bird as the anhinga we have here in the US.

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Here’s a different individual doing a takeoff from the river. They’re colloquially known both in African and the US as snakebirds as they swim with just their head and neck out of the water. They eat fish which they dive for…but their feathers are not waterproof which means takeoff is somewhat difficult for them. They’re fairly heavy (2.5-3.5 pounds) birds for their size and as a result they do a sort of running takeoff to get airborne…jumping out of the water then keeping putting their feet down and pushing off repeatedly until they get enough airspeed to fly. This sequence is about 3 seconds or so in length.

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And finally fully airborne…it will go sit on a tree somewhere with its wings spread to let the wind and sun dry them out.

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A different individual

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Small crocodile…this one is about a foot and a half long so is probably 2 years old.

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Malachite Kingfisher…even at 1/4000 o a second shutter speed there’s still some motion blur in the wings. Not as bas as a hummingbird but still a pretty fast critter. Precapture with his Nikon Z8 gave him this sequence…he would have never gotten the launch without it.

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Little Egret…or Snowy Egret as it is named in the US. Wading birds have several different feeding techniques. Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons stand still and then stab down to grab prey when it comes near. Little Egrets and Snowy Egrets use their golden feet and walk slowly along shuffling their feet to scare the prey into moving then stab down to grab it. Then there is the technique used by Reddish Egrets and similar who spread their wings to provide shade and then the prey swims into the shade and becomes lunch.

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Cormorant

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Black Winged Stilt

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Black Skimmer

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Funeral procession…Namibian style

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With that…their short morning boat ride came to an end and they went back to the houseboat to gather their luggage before heading off.

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Next up…a trip through Namibian immigration exit and then Botswana immigration entering. They went in their boat over to the Namibian side and found this buoy to mark the location. Like the folks in Alaska…apparently Africans never throw anything away either…they basically painted an empty propane container and used it for a buoy…Neil wondered what the anchor for it was.

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After doing the double immigration thing they moored again on the south side of the Chobe river and headed back to the Pangolin Lodge for lunch…after which the group all said their ‘until next times’ and 4 of the six of them headed off toe the airport for the return flight in the early afternoon to Johannesburg. The remaining two went a different direction…one back to Victoria Falls and the other to another safari trip in Zambia. On arrival back at Johannesburg there was yet another immigration thing to enter South Africa and then the group of 4 broke up heading to various destinations

For Neil…he left the airport and walked across the street to the IHG Hotel again. Checked in and had a nice kudu steak dinner and hit the sack early to catch up on sleep after a long hot shower. Early the next morning it was the start of another long travel day for him. He checked out, walked back to the airport and then basically killed time waiting on his 2200 departing flight…but it was at least business class so after an afternoon killing time in the airport he checked in and went to the lounge for some food. His overnight flight was from Johannesburg to Amsterdam…then a hour and a half layover before boarding his flight to Atlanta. That one got in a bit late due to some thunderstorms but he made his connection to Fort Myers with an hour to spare before finally arriving back home about 2300. Connie picked him up…but she was pretty much a nervous wreck when they met up as she got caught in a tropical downpour on the freeway on the way to the airport…she was down to 30 mph it was raining so hard. He drove home since she was done and then they unleaded the car and hit the sack…leaving unpacking for the next day. They had one day off before a scheduled dental appointment and then her previously scheduled breast cancer surgery…they were lucking able to schedule that so it didn’t interfere with the trip.

So…now that he’s been to Africa twice…Serengeti in Tanzania and to Botswana…I asked him if he was going to back and if so where and why. He’s hem-ing and haw-ing about it be cause they’re really two completely different sort of environments. Both trips were outstanding…but he thinks if he were to do it again he would do Tanzania…primarily because of the 11 days in Botswana 7 or 8 of them were boat rides which mean you need to stay on the river and can only see critters that are near the river. On the land portion you’re in much more wooded areas as opposed to the Serengeti where you can literally see for miles. Since it’s all on land…while the vehicles mostly follow previously used paths that are sorta like roads…it’s easy for the driver to go off-road and get to where the critters are…that’s how they got most of the lion shots from his previous trip and they would not have gotten the caracal at all without the ability to go off-road. On the other hand…the hippo shots were much better from the boat on the river as opposed to being up on the bank over the herd…and they also got leopards in Botswana but that’s really luck of the draw as Serengeti has them as well. 

He’s glad he went to Botswana and isn’t sure whether the cost of another trip to the continent is worth it…but thinks Serengeti would be his choice next time. While they did get some good shots from the boat…the inability to leave the river definitely made 4 legged creatures harder to find. On the other hand…the kingfisher shots would not have happened in Serengeti since they stay by the rivers…so which one he would recommend really depends on what one wants to see. For most people…cats and herd animals are what they go to Africa for and those were overall better in Serengeti.

I’ve just got a few interesting things found on the net…but his is already pretty long so I’ll keep them for next time.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Nature, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Botswana Trip Day 11 Part 1

Posted on 2026/03/16 by Gunther

Well…we’re down to the last day of the Botswana trip but it’s going to be divided into 2 posts as despite a relatively short photo outing as I’ll discuss in a bit it was photographically speaking pretty productive.

Since my last post on the 5th…we’ve not done all that much but Ima gonna report on it anyway. 

We were supposed to go to Wichita Falls TX for a Saint Saëns Organ Symphony concert last weekend but the weather had other ideas. We had flights our early Saturday morning with a connection through Dallas to Wichita Falls and had car, hotel, and dinner reservations as well as tickets to the concert with a planed flight early Sunday afternoon back through Dallas to home. Unfortunately…the weather in TX had a severe thunderstorm warning with hail and that resulted in a ground hold of all flights for about 2 hours. And that resulted in our flight out of Fort Myers getting delayed to the point that even if the weather in Dallas cleared we would miss our connecting flight. So we gave up and came home about 0900 and cancelled the hotel, car, and dinner reservations. On the bright side…Neil took Connie out for a nice dinner at Longhorns instead…he had lamb chops and she had the chopped steak with onion mushroom gravy. All was excellent and they had enough leftovers for a dinner and a lunch. 

Then there was an issue with some fraudulent ACH transactions on the Ladies of Elks account…but that eventually turned out OK and all the funds were restored as of today. She’s going to be the treasurer in the next year starting April 1 and they’re going to move their account because nobody at their current  bank offered to freeze the account after the first of three fraudulent transactions. 

Connie had her 6 month post cancer surgery mammogram and she was seriously worried about it…Neil thought that after her easy acceptance of the cancer itself and the surgery it would not be a problem but she was really down until the radiologist told her everything was normal. She’s still a bit concerned about the appearance of her chest after the surgery…basically they had to dig around a lot more than they expected to looking for this little marker thing they leave in after the biopsy…and the surgeon had some issues finding it so she’s a little more lumpy than she would like. Neil told her it’s just fine…neither of them are spring chickens anymore anyway and I think she occasionally actually believes him.

They had another nice Date Night on Friday…went to Carrabba’s and had fish since it’s still Lent…but they took advantage of the 10 dollar take home entree and brought home some lamb chops that made an excellent dinner later on. 

Neil’s right side hearing aid failed…it was the speaker part and not the electronic part but the audiologist found a crack so he had to order a new pair at his appointment today. The good news is that the 4 versions newer firmware provides much better voice isolation from background noise and that’s mostly what he has a problem with. The bad news is they’re expensive…but they’ll be in on Friday. He’s been using just a single one the past week and he’s gotta admit that not being able to hear well sucks.

Ok, let’s talk about the last day in Botswana…at least the first part of it. In order to go on the houseboat, after leaving the Okavango Delta they went across the river to the Namibia side after going through Botswana immigration and went through incoming immigration for Namibia. No big deal really…the clients had already gotten the visa for Namibia ahead of time so it was just a paperwork drill. On leaving the houseboat they had to reverse the process to get back into Botswana of course. They had flights out to return to Johannesburg (4 of the clients) in the early after noon while the other two were headed off overland to Victoria Falls. Long story short…it was a short boat ride in the morning followed by the immigration shuffle, lunch at the Pangolin Lodge and getting off to the airport for the flights.

So…on to the first half of the photos.

African Fish Eagle right after sunrise…Neil rally liked this silhouette shot.

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Goliath Heron…the largest heron on the planet at about 5 feet tall and 8 foot wingspan. They saw several of them on the trip.

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This African Fish Eagle obviously got too close to the nesting site of the Long Toed Lapwing pair as they harassed it until it left. Strange that such a large predator bird would be easily chased off.

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Next it was off to the area in the river known as the Race…a rapids area with a lot of rock piles. Many nesting birds there so they got a lot of bird in flight (BIF) possibilities.

African Darters and Cormorants.

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Bushbuck Doe…these were actually in the property of another hotel they passed on the way to the Race.

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A couple of hippos measuring their prowess.

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African Sacred Ibis

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Yellow Billed Stork bringing some nesting material

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And another couple of those…the males get that pink underwing coloration during mating season.

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Striated Heron…about the size of a night heron here in the US…perhaps 18 inches tall maximum.

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African Jacana walking on water.

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It really liked this plant bulb thing. Not sure whether it wanted to eat the inside of it or whether it had some bugs inside it wanted but it was pretty darned interested in it.

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Cormorant launching

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African Open Bill…guess how it got its name. It’s a stork and the opening in the bill facilitates grabbing the snails which is its primary food source. Fairly large bird…larger than a Great Blue Heron and more in the same size as the Yellow Billed Stork but smaller than the Goliath Heron.

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I will pick up later with the rest of the shots from the morning as well as some description of the remainder of the trip for Neil.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Nature, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Botswana Trip Day 10

Posted on 2026/03/05 by Gunther

Ok, we’re down to the next to last day in Botswana…Neil’s sort of surprised that for a trip in August it’s March the following year before getting them all done…but ya know…life intrudes.

Anyways…what’s been going on here since my last post. 

Basically…not much out of the ordinary. We did have a couple concerts in the Fort Myers Community series…first up was one called Three Italian Tenors. It was actually 4 of them, the printed insert in the program that said one of them was sick was on the same paper stock as the program itself which is commercially printed so it seemed like a setup. The 4th guy was amazingly enough also Italian and they sang mostly Italian opera pieces. Neil had googled before hand and it turns out that Italian composers (or at least operas in Italian) lead the list in total numbers. We recognized vaguely some of the pieces, many of them not at all, and easily recognized just 2 or 3…but since we’re not normal opera go-ers that seems about right. None of them were the next incarnation of Pavoratti but they were better than decent and entertaining. The piano accompanist stole the comedy section of the show in our opinion but then this series isn’t generally considered high brow classical music but more in the lines of classical entertainment. The second one was a production of Carmen but done with Flamenco dancers instead of singing although the 4 piece accompanying musician group did some singing.

We also got the oil changed in both cars, had annual maintenance on our A/C unit, and Connie had choir and Mastersingers rehearsals along with cantoring for a funeral Mass…but other than that it’s pretty much normal life here. We had some cooler weather around my last post but the past few days have been almost summer like.

Our allergies have been acting up a lot the past couple of weeks…as we get older that is getting overall worse. It was so bad that Neil skipped 3 bike days last week and went shorter than planned this week so far but he’s slowly improving.

OK, on to photos.

Pied Kingfisher

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Green Heron…very similar to our Green Heron here in the US but not identical.

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African Jacana

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Striated Heron

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Mr. And Mrs Pied on the roof of the houseboat

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Helmeted Guineafowl

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Juvenile Black Crowned Night Heron launching. As in many other instances…similar to but not the same species as the US version.

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Another Green Heron

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And another Striated Heron launching

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Pensive Baboon

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Malachite Kingfisher

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Crocodile

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He was still amazed that people would go down the river full pf crocodiles and hippos in a craft like this

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Hippos nearby where the guys above were…this is just about 1/3 of the total bloat (that’s what a herd of them is named).

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Yellow Billed Stork

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Herd of elephants crossing the river.

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And then after crossing they need to re-coat themselves with dust to prevent sunburn.

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Yellow Billed Stork in flight

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Marabou Stork

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Another African Jacana…Neil especially likes the way he caught it with the water still coming off it’s foot as it mostly walks on water

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African Fish Eagle takeoff sequence

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And after landing briefly it took off again the other direction

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These next two are both of the same Brown Hooded Kingfisher and I would normally only have shown one of them but for a couple of items. The two shots are about 20 seconds apart and the boat moved 20 feet or so between the two of them as you can see from the orientation of the perch. They serve to show how a very slight change in photographer position can seriously improve (or in this case downgrade) the shot giving either the nice dark buttery background or just some blue sky which isn’t nearly as nice of an image. The second item is that kingfishers cannot digest the bones so they puke them up and spit them out once the nutritional part of the meal passes on into the digestive tract.

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Another African Fish Eagle…nicely posed for them

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As the afternoon boat drive wore on there was a nice hippo opportunity

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Followed by some Elephants at sunset along with another hippo yawning (not really, but that’s what it’s called) near sunset. Hippos do this display to help establish hierarchy and dominance among the members of the bloat without resorting to actual fighting.

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And this last one you can just barely see the last remnant of the sun as it set mid frame along with a wider shot of the elephant herd. A great way to end the day before heading back to the houseboat which had returned from miles upriver to the original mooring location for the next morning’s Zambia immigration/Botswana arrival sequence at the end of the morning boat ride before lunch back the Pangolin Lodge then the flight back out to where all of the participants were going. 

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Interesting things found on the net.

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HEIF Image 3.

HEIF Image 8.

Cyas.

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Nature, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Botswana Trip Day 9 Part 2

Posted on 2026/02/23 by Gunther

Not much to report on the home front since my last post. Connie and Neil had their semi-annual teeth cleaning at their dentist and we had the Mastersinger’s 25th Anniversary Gala on Saturday…Neil had on a sport coat for the first time in probably 10 years and Connie wore a nice black and silver dressy skirt and top. They sprung for the expensive tickets including the pre-dinner cocktail hour and got to see the guy that composed the piece the group is singing at their upcoming concert. It is named The Witness and is essentially the diary of the group’s director’s great grandfather from the Civil War but set to music. It’s mostly a vanity piece for the director…but it actually sounds pretty decent…Neil’s been at rehearsals most of the last month on Monday since her car was in the shop getting the leak fixed.

They’ve got another episode in the Community Concert series they signed up for tomorrow night so they’ve moved Date Night to Wednesday and then moved Friday’s to Sunday since they’ve got a Sarasota Symphony concert that day. And she’s going to the fashion show put on by the Catholic Women’s group the day before on Saturday. And they’re headed down on Thursday to get the oil changed and tires rotated on both cars…so another pretty busy week for them.

Next week is again…busy. Another community concert and then a Saint Säens Organ Symphony Concert over the weekend.

It’s been warmer the past week or so but today and tomorrow it is downright cold again with lows around 40 and highs barely making 60. 

Saw an interesting story on the news today…there’s this comedian with around a half million followers on YouTube and social media. He’s scheduled to depart soon from his wife for 3 months for a tour so decided to take her to Hawaii from Phoenix before hand. It’s a long flight and he’s pretty well off so he booked and paid for first class tickets. The flight over was just fine but when they checked in for the return red eye flight where they hoped to sleep some they discovered they had been booted from their paid for seats to row 18 in the basic economy section. The reason was that 2 pilots (American Airlines) were deadheading back to Phoenix and their union contract guarantees them first class seats. Now the right thing to do would have been to offer to rebook the comedian and his wife on the next available flight and pay for their hotel…but apparently AA doesn’t believe in doing the right thing. Their response was…tough nuggies…you’re stuck in row 18 and we’ll offer you a $500 voucher for another AA flight later on despite them paying thousands more for their paid for first class seats. So the comedian put up a 30 minute video on YouTube describing how they were basically screwed by AA and I’m sure his half million followers will generate plenty of bad publicity for the airline. And he’ll never fly them again after this episode…proving once again that you shouldn’t piss off a person with lots of followers.  Dumb…just dumb.

Up in DC…both parties are continuing to exhibit extraordinary levels of stupidity in both the House, Senate, and administration. I’m sure ya’ll have seen it on the news so I won’t point out any of the idiocy here…although apparently the administration is seriously considering attacking Iran again…but again, a I said…dumb, just dumb.

Ok, when last we left our intrepid hero (Neil) he had completed the flight back to Kasana and the morning boat ride…so it was time for the houseboat to head upriver. It’s got a speed of 7 or 8 knots and they cruised probably 20 miles upstream before mooring to the northern bank of the Chobe River for the evening. They then had an afternoon boat ride in a new section of the river (well, new to them at least) before getting back for dinner just about sunset.

Cormorant

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Black Heron…notice it’s got the same golden feet that the Snowy Egret in the US has. It’s one of those species that shuffles it’s feet along the bottom to scare up prey before grabbing it as opposed to the stand there and wait for prey to swim buy that Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets (as well as most other wading birds in the US) use.

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It decided not to land at the original spot due to the presence of the other bird at the far left.

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And instead reversed course and headed over to the right to a tree.

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Great Egret…similar to our Snowy.

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Black Skimmer

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He grabbed a shot across the river to show the difference in water level between the wet and dry season…that’s about a 7 or 8 foot difference as visible on the shoreline brush.

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Headed upriver on the houseboat.

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Elephants getting a mud bath.

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Kudu cow.

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A pair of young Impala bucks practicing for their adulthood fights for mating rights.

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Crocodile.

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Another Black Heron.

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Black Headed Heron with lunch.

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A couple of juvenile giraffes…again practicing for adult mating rights battles.

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This hippo actually charged their boat…but fortunately it turned out around once it was in the water far enough that it could no longer run.

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It was part of a larger group…rather than fight constantly hippos yawn and show their tusks and dominance hierarchy is established without bloodshed.

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And naturally…the dominant mail in the group marks his territory with scent. Lions and cats do it by peeing around the edges of their territory but hippos are different. They spin their tail like a helicopter rotor while pooping to scatter it (and the scent) about.

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It was getting pretty dark by that last shot and that day’s sunset was pretty much forgettable.

Cyas.

 

Posted in Africa, Botswana, Critters, Okavango Delta, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment