Hoi An Landscape (2), Vietnam

A sunny, bright Hoi An morning seen from my second floor balcony. This photo was taken at the end of May, and in the month that passed since the previous photo was taken, summer arrived and a rice harvest took place. The days are getting longer, and the sun was a half an hour above the horizon at 6:15 am. It was already late for a morning stroll — by 7:00 or 7:30 at the latest, the temperature would hit 90 degrees on its way to a high of around 100 degrees by late morning.

Hoi An Landscape, Vietnam

The view at 6:00 in the morning from the second floor balcony of my home in Hoi An. After four years living in increasingly congested Da Nang with its million plus people, I moved at the end of March to much smaller, quieter, and more scenic Hoi An, some twenty kilometers down the road from Da Nang. This photo was taken at the end of April, about a month after I arrived in my new locale.

Bridge of Flowers, Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts

The Bridge of Flowers began life in 1908 as a bridge across the Deerfield River for trolleys connecting the Massachusetts towns of Shelburne Falls and Buckland. The trolleys eventually disappeared, but the bridge remained. It apparently could not be ripped down because a water main connecting the two towns was built into the structure. The bridge had become a rundown eyesore when an enterprising woman named Antoinette Burnham convinced the town to convert the structure into a flower garden in 1929. Since then the bridge has gone through restoration work and has been preserved until today it is a local tourist attraction.