Grounds for Sculpture is a 42-acre sculpture park near Trenton, NJ. It was founded by John Seward Johnson II, the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, who in turn was the founder of Johnson & Johnson. The park is a great place to walk around and see sculptures from Seward Johnson and others. It is nicely landscaped and you can spend hours on the grounds looking at different areas and be surprised by hidden sculptures.
Below some of the photos from our visit.
October has arrived, which is beautiful time of the year in Pennsylvania. The trees change color resulting in some of the most beautiful displays of color in the USA. I have previously posted fall pictures. I wanted to complement this with a number of 360s I have taken over the last year in October.
The first one is of Lumberville footbridge. Lumberville is a small town along the Delaware in Pennsylvania. There is footbridge connecting Lumberville with Bull’s island, a beautiful park along the Delaware in New Jersey. This picture was taken from relatively high above the bridge and gives you a good view of the bridge, the river and the trees changing colors.
You can explore the panorama interactively here:
The second panorama is along the Delaware canal path, a beautiful hiking path between the Delaware and a disused canal. On this specific panorama you can see a ruin, the canal as well as the trees changing colors.
Again, you can explore the panorama interactively here:
Finally, this panorama is taken in the woods along the Delaware and gives you a good sense for some of the color display in the trees.
You can explore the panorama interactively here:
The weather got a bit cooler and we had an opportunity to make a walk from Stockton to New Hope along the Delaware river, up on the New Jersey site and back on the Pennsylvania site, a walk of about 7.2 miles/11.6 km. It was beautiful walk and below some of the photos.
One of our highlights when we lived in South Africa, now more than 10 years ago, was to attend the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, which has now been renamed to Makhanda. The arts festival is an 11 day celebration of performing and visual arts with some amazing music, theater, comedy and dance. As South Africa is such a diverse country with many different cultures and attracts international talent, there were always many amazing performances to see. We attended the festival for five days in 2006 and attended the full 11 days the following year.
Although we love attending the festival, we have not been able to return since we moved away from South Africa as it was a very long trip. This year however, the world around us has changed significantly due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and South Africa is no exception. Due to the pandemic, for the first time in its 46-year history, the National Arts Festival was held entirely online from 25 June to 5 July 2020.
Although it is not the same as attending in person, we did take the opportunity to attend the festival virtually this year from our home in the US. We saw some great music (especially Jazz), a variety of different African dances, some interesting plays and participated in some great virtual digital experiences.
For example, Digital Rise brought a performance called Mechanical Souls which involved all the participants being onboarded in a fictitious human droid company. As part of our “onboarding” , we were invited to watch a VR movie of a wedding including some droids the company made. However there is a twist in that every participant sees a different version of the movie. We then jointly discovered the full story by discussing what we saw as a group. It was a great, interactive, performance and a great use of different digital media.
Another example of a digital experience was “Human Study #1 from a distance” which was brought by a Belgian Artist, Patrick Tresset who built a performative installation using robotic agents drawing participants, similar to an artist looking at their subject and drawing it. The experience involved posing for 20 minutes in a Zoom session while the robots made their drawings using different algorthims. You can find some of the photos of the experience as well as the final drawings below.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience and it was great to be able to attend this unique arts festival virtually. Attending in person is obviously a much better experience, but it was impressive what the festival managed to achieve in a virtual environment and we appreciated being able to attend this amazing event in these unprecedented times
As a Belgian living in Switzerland it is really great to see one of our Swiss panorama pictures from last year featured in a Belgian app magazine. The 2014 summer edition of the free VAB Magazine app featured the panorama we posted last year on this blog of the cabrio lift going up Stanserhorn. The panorama features the first cabrio cable car in the world.
If you want to find out more about this lift or about Stanserhorn, make sure to check out our post from last year.
Some of our panoramas are becoming famous. One of our Inside the Volcano panoramas was featured in a recent issue of travel + Escape magazine for iPad! The special issue about Iceland has an article about the Inside the Volcano trip we mentioned in a previous post and included one of the panoramas to show an immersive experience. Check out the free app in the App Store and the “Wild Weekends in Iceland” issue (1.99 USD)!
Another one of our panoramas is featured on a blog about James Bond. The blog describes Schilthorn where the James Bond movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” was set. We visited the mountain a couple of years ago in summer during clear weather and enjoyed the beautiful views of the surroundings, including views of Eiger, Mönch and Jungrau. As usual, we took the opportunity to take a panorama of the surroundings.
Have a look at the panorama here:
Piz Gloria panorama
Or have a look at the interactive version here:
We, The Wanderers, are pleased to announce that we have redesigned our blog from scratch. We changed the technology and fine-tuned it to give you the best possible experience to read of our adventures, browse photos, look around panoramas and explore gigapans. We’ve added videos as well, a much improved newsletter, easier viewing of photos on the site, integrated gallery, integrated panoramas that are easier to use, and integrated gigapans. Apart from all the benefits for you, the site is also much easier to maintain and update from our side which means we will be able to add content more frequently than we have been doing over the last few years. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter if you have not already done so to stay up to date about new content.
The Wanderers multiplied
You will have noticed we changed the banner at the top. This photo is a real photo, without manipulation. Some places are not what they seem, and of those, some make interesting photos. For those of you who were fond of the old header, we have included it below:
We hope you find the site easy to use. Read the latest news on the homepage, browse specific countries by going to the locations menu, have a look at our photos, interact with our latest panorama photos or dive into our high-definition gigapans. Be sure to click on images to get a full-page view and to interact with panoramas and gigapans. Read how on the help page. You can give us feedback in the About section of the page.
Enjoy the new site!
This webpage contains the adventures of Johan and Karl, the worldwide wanderers. We hope you find the site easy to use. Read the latest news below, browse specific countries by going to the locations menu, have a look at our photos, interact with our latest panorama photos or dive into our high-definition gigapans. Be sure to click on images to get a full-page view and to interact with panoramas and gigapans. Read how on the help page. You can give us feedback in the About section of the page and if you want to stay up to date about our adventures, sign up for the newsletter on the right hand side of this page. Enjoy!
One of the things we noticed about living in Switzerland is how honest (most) people are: when anyone looses and object, others go through efforts to try to get it back to them. Typically, if people don’t know who the object belongs to, the finder places it in a very visible place so the person who lost it can easily find it back.
Case in point was the following sign which we noticed at the noticeboard at the entrance to our building. Someone had found an earring and did not only not just take it, they went through the trouble of creating a sign and attaching the earring to the sign so the person who has lost the earring can easily find it back.
The sign reads “who has lost this?”
The same honesty applies when you leave your bag or suitcase sitting somewhere – you typically do not have to worry about someone taking it.
Our website has gone very quiet lately, mainly due to being extremely busy. For those of you who are wondering, we still are alive and well and still are in South Africa.
In general, living in South Africa is like living in any other developed country with reasonable good road infrastructure, good housing, shopping malls, telephone, etc. It would be easy to forget that one is actually living in Africa.
Now and then, you get reminded of this fact when reading the local newspaper with stories about a witch being killed by her fellow villagers, a chieftainess being killed because the village does not agree with having a female leader or a four-year old being killed by a traditional healer to ensure a successful hairdresser business. Of course, you also learn about some of the local Xhosa traditions such as the initiation rituals or boys stick fighting.
It is amazing to think that all those stories happen so nearby and you are not really aware of it on a day-to-day basis. However, we are also reminded about the fact that we are living in Africa every time recently we have electricity cuts. This happens on almost a daily basis, often for several hours at a time. Much of this is due to “load shedding” as there is not enough electricity to go around, so the power company turns of different parts of the country at different times. It would not be that bad if it would be announced when such cuts would happen, but the power company, Eskom, and the city, who send us the bill, cannot agree on who should inform the public so nobody knows when the cuts will strike. What we do know is that the problem is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it has become such a normal event that people hardly react when it happens. The other day I was in a business meeting when the electricity, and therefore the lights, projector and airconditioning, went of. People just continued to talk as if nothing has happened as it is such a common occurrence. Similarly, you learn to live with it at home.
A few weeks ago, the electricity outage caused our ADSL Internet connection to go down … and stay down for 8 days! The local telecommunications monopoly, Telkom, had many issues countrywide resulting in waiting times of up to two hours for phone support. The people providing the support often did not know what was happening and our ticket was closed automatically after a few days, even though the problem was not solved! Mind you, for all of this, we are paying among the highest ADSL prices in the world for very poor speed.
So, yes, we still are living in Africa …