Summer 2017. My wife and I drove ourselves up, over, and down the eastern, northern, and western coasts of the Scottish Highlands. Before arriving, I used Google Earth to locate the sandiest, most expansive Highlands beaches I could find.

We started vacationing in the Dolomiti back in 2011. Since then, we’ve returned at least 2-3 times per year regardless of the season. It’s one of our favorite hideaways in all of Europe regardless of weather or season.

After watching Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson present Fäviken in Season 1 of Netflix’s Chef’s Table series, I looked at my wife and said, “We’re going.” Two years later, we scored a hard-to-get dinner reservation. We flew to Norway, rented a car, and drove ourselves to Åre during a brief sub-arctic Indian summer, where we then had the most memorable dining experiences of our lives.

Growing up in Michigan’s lower peninsula, I learned to notice lakes, trees, hills, and agricultural lands. Having lived 17 years of my adult life in Switzerland, however, I’ve had the opportunity to notice alpine wildflowers. And now, suffice it to say, I’m rather obsessed with them. Here’s a tiny sample…

Even before reading Anna Tsing’s stunning book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, back in 2015, I already had an eye for fungi. These photos were taken during 2011-2020.

I’m the son of a professional aquatic entomologist, so I guess you could say I’m predisposed to noticing smallish creatures. Here, I share some of my insect and arachnid photos taken during my regular strolls.

Late one autumn night whilst walking home, I looked up: it was cloudy, it was misty. There were no stars. It was not a van Gogh night. But then, when I looked down, there were near-perfect stars…sooooo many of them.

We live in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton known as Ticino. We have palm trees where we live, olive trees, vineyards, and a mostly Mediterranean climate, and yet, the central spine of mighty Swiss Alps is only a 75 minute drive to the north of us. During recent summers my wife and I rented a cabin/cascina in the Alta Leventina, which presented us with a welcome opportunity to explore the northernmost region of our canton.