Venice 2017: The Accademia Walk

So, do you really want to know why this wasn't posted yesterday (my normal Thursday posting)?????  (** see below if you really want to know)

Believe it or not, I've always known I'd go back to our Venice trip from a year ago, simply because I hadn't finished it.  Maybe I just needed to move on from it then.  But now that I have the time, I'm inspired again by that place.

On our 3rd day, Sunday, March 26, we took the Accademia walk in our tour book,

starting at the Rialto Bridge at the top down to the Accademia Bridge to the south (red dots).

On Facebook back then I showed this collage.

The Rialto Bridge is top-left.  The Accademia Bridge is bottom-right.

I also showed this collage on Facebook, adding to the "humanity" of the place.

This is what I posted today on Shutterchance, at the Rialto Bridge.
How can you not love Venice!

Facebook?  That may be another story for some of you, right?

Accademia itself is an art gallery, founded in 1750 and moved in 1807 to its present location.

When most tourists hear Accademia, they think art.

But Astrid and I were there on the walk to see everything else except the museum.

Like graffiti, for instance, which is its own art, right?

That particular walk offered up a feast of gable stones.

The Dutch have their own version of such stones, as you know, but these, too, fascinate me.

Sometimes I isolate a particular image for my Shutterchance blog.  That's fun for me.

But see what I mean?  

I'm sure every single one tells a story.

Look at Astrid, straddling one of the alleys.

THIS is the Accademia area.

Full of its own art everywhere you look.

Of course, you could say that's true of ALL of Venice!

But that little boy (above) with his camera, in particular, stole my heart.



Art in all its many forms!

There was so much more, including some of the buildings and churches of the area,

maybe for another day/post.

When we finished the walk, we took the time to hop on a vaporetto to nearby Piazza San Marco.

But that deserves a post all on its own!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

**  Suffice it to say, yesterday I lost an entire folder of images (including everything I processed and their collages!) for this 3rd day of our Venice trip.  LOST.  As in not to be found anywhere (apart from paying for them to be recovered, which I'm too cheap to do).  The FOLDER was NOT lost/moved.  Just the images in it.  A total mystery.

The good news is that I have a backup of all the original photos on another external hard drive, as well as on Picasa.  But it took me till today to figure out that I could refresh my images on Picasa (something it usually does automatically) to find the processed images and collages.  Then it was a matter of getting them back into the (empty) folder for this post.  (sigh)

Oh well, live and learn.  Next time I will back up the processed images to my other hard drive immediately after each folder is done!

Watercolor Sunday and Saturday's Color: February 2018

It helps when you have a really short month to make the time fly even faster, right?  It also helps to have two weeks of Winter Olympics!  Did you know that the USA won only 3 more overall medals than the Netherlands????  23-20.  That's really saying something about this wee country (whose children are born on skates, as you know by now).

Anyway, I digress.

My Watercolor Sunday posts on Facebook for February 2018:

February 4 (photo manipulation)

"People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy."

--Anton Chekhov

February 11 (photo manipulation)

"You can lead a heart to love, but you can't make it fall."

--George Strait

February 18 (photo manipulation)

"I think the way to become the best is to just have fun."

--Shaun White, American Olympic gold medalist in snowboarding 2006, 2010, and 2018.

February 25 (photo manipulation)

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern,

which shines only on the waves behind us!"

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

My Saturday's Color posts on Facebook for February 2018:

(finished on 22 January 2018, posted on FB 3 February 2018)

This Vintage Patterns design (on black-background paper) reminds me of my maternal grandmother,

Olive Nelson Bennett, who designed wallpaper for a ritzy company in New York City back in her day.

[Sister, Ruth Hart Mowry, says the wallpaper company was Thibaut, the oldest American
wallpaper company, established 1886.  I have a feeling I owe a LOT to her!]

(finished on 20 August 2017, posted on FB 10 February 2018)

Did you watch the opening ceremony of the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games?

OMG!  How awesome and spectacular.  

I saw the Olympic Rings all over this Techellations design.

"The Olympic flag has a white background, with five interlaced rings in the centre:

blue, yellow, black, green and red.

The design is symbolic; it represents the five continents of the world, united by Olympism,

while the six colours are those that appear on all the national flags of the world at the present time."

(finished on 13 February 2018, posted on FB 17 February 2018)

So, what do you see!

We're now midway through the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Did you know that there are 38 countries (out of 195) that have a tricolor red, white and blue flag?

You can see the Dutch and French flags here, which are always easy to confuse.

(from my Mindfulness book)

(finished on 16 December 2017, posted on FB 24 February 2018)

We're getting ready to break our coldest record ever for this time of the year here where we live

in the Netherlands (at the same time that we're seeing many signs of spring.)

The canals may even freeze again, finally, for ice skating (and not just at the Olympics!).

(from my Kaleido Color book)

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Actually, on that last note, while it's been cold enough, the ice is NOT good for skating because of the winds that have rendered it unsafe...with patches that are too thin next to patches thick enough.  One man has already died from falling through the ice (age 75) and 4 kids also have fallen through.  I learn every day so much from Astrid about these things!