travel
Tour de France 2026
We visited Paris, France, this July, and we were right at the finish line for the final stage of the 2026 Tour de France.
In 2024 we traveled to the Tour de France as well, touring with Custom Getaways for the third and final week, with its historic finish in Nice.
For our 2026 trip, we wandered Paris on our own, visiting as many spots as we could before the race.
Along with Stage 21 of the Tour, we visited:
- The Arc de Triomphe
- Notre-Dame and the Latin Quarter
- The Louvre Museum
- Versailles: the château and gardens
- The Eiffel Tower with dinner at Madame Brasserie
- Montmartre and the Sacré-Cœur Basilica
- And of course, shopping and people-watching on the Champs-Élysées
A highlight of the trip was dinner at Restaurant Origines Paris, featured in the 2025 Michelin Guide.
For the finale of the 2026 Tour de France, we purchased grandstand tickets through Custom Getaways, with seats just 50 meters from the finish line.
The video below was taken with an iPhone 17 Pro and a DJI Osmo Pocket 3.
Video - Tour de France 2024
Video from our trip to the 2024 Tour de France, it’s 15min but quite entertaining!
We toured with Custom Getaways and had a wonderful time. They’re an official tour operator of the Tour de France, making us part of the tour with special access and events, amazing!
The video was taken with an iPhone 15 Pro and a DJI Osmo Pocket 3.
Yosemite - Summer 2012
About a month or so ago my wife and I went on a camping trip with some friends in Yosemite National Park. It was much warmer than we thought it would be, and there were even a few mild rain showers, but overall it was a wonderful trip. This wasn't my first time camping, but it was my first trip to Yosemite and the valley was just beautiful. We didn't branch out into the wilderness too much, as we were just there for a couple of days. After a long day of travel on foot, the pizza and beer at the Curry Village Pizza Deck (Wayback Machine link) was a lifesaver... more than once!
Sadly, it's come to light that several people who stayed in Curry Village's "signature tent cabins" were infected with hantavirus (Wayback Machine link) during the same time we were in Yosemite, and a few people have died. The cabins in question were poorly designed; they were built in 2009 after a rockfall from Glacier Point destroyed buildings and caused minor injuries (Wayback Machine link). The continued high risk of rockfalls (Wayback Machine link) has prompted the closure of other areas of the park as well. We camped in our own tent and never saw any mice, but we did hear a colossal boom and cracking sound in the late afternoon that we could only assume to be a rockfall somewhere in the valley.
Now on to the photos – I'm going to save all the silly, sweaty, hiking photographs for my personal file and just stick to some nice landscape shots.
The first picture is of the Wawona Tunnel View, this is the classic Yosemite picture that all first-timers just have to take. On the left side of this photo is El Capitan, in the center is Half Dome, and on the right side is Bridalveil Fall. There are many other rock formations in the largely granite, glacier-carved valley, but El Capitan and Half Dome are perhaps the most famous.