This is not the type of post I intended to make, documenting our 2013 cruise in Ukraine. Yesterday I tried to find out what was happening in Odesa and discovered that in July 2023 Transfiguration Cathedral was heavily damaged.

The following photograph is from the New York Times in their article about the attack.

In this post I’m going to show some photographs of Istanbul related to the Bosporus: a Bosporus cruise and sights along the Bosporus. And next comes Ukraine! We just added a few days in Istanbul before our Ukraine Viking cruise.

The Topkapi Palace is now a museum but in the 15th and 16th centuries it served as the main residence and administrative headquarters of the Ottoman sultans. I must say our visit was not as pleasant as it could have been. First it was raining, and second it was so crowded there were very long lines to get into any of the buildings. So we mostly wandered the grounds, which were beautiful. It is also huge and we did not have a guidebook.

I discovered the old feed mill in Johnson City, Texas, in 2008. It had been converted into a complex of businesses that were no longer in operation and it was already in disrepair. I took it upon myself to attempt to photograph it. Recently I came back to these photos and realized there seems to be very few photos of it on the internet, so I decided to process my photos for a story. The complex has now been turned into the Science Mill and it is from their site that I got its history.

This photo is the widest view of the complex that I have, so I decided to start with it. As you can see, someone went to a huge amount of work decorating the buildings. Stay tuned for many photos of the complex I took in 2008, 2009 and one last shot of what the street side looked like in 2018. The Science Mill was established in 2012.

Taos Pueblo is a National Historic Landmark and a World Heritage Site. According to the Taos Pueblo website “the multi-storied adobe buildings have been continuously inhabited for over 1000 years.” You can read an interesting introduction to the site on the nps.gov Taos Pueblo website.

Although it was closed to the public for a while during the covid pandemic, it is now open again. These photographs were taken in June 2009. Click on any photo for a larger view.