by Jim Bellomo | Sep 6, 2026 | Air travel
Today is the start of my solo trip. I am sitting in the dark in our living room at 5:15 am as I write this. I have been up since 3:15, and that’s been my plan all week: to slowly shift my internal time from Redmond to Brugge. My flight is at 3:55 this afternoon, so I won’t even be leaving the house until 10:30. Lots to do between now and then. Ride my bike, clean the kitchen, play Strands and Connections with Kathleen, walk the dog, and pack the last few things and a little more.
I am both looking forward to and a little anxious about the trip. While I fully realize that when we travel, I do most of the planning, Kathleen keeps me on course. She’s the one I look to when I want to know if I have forgotten anything. She notices when I have dropped something. She takes care of me in many little ways. I won’t have that on this trip. And as I told her yesterday, I remember from my old days of traveling alone for business that the worst part of traveling alone is having to drag everything with you when you do anything, like using a restroom or going into an airport shop.
Change of venue. After finishing up and kissing Keeley goodbye, Kathleen took me into Redmond, where I caught the brand-new light rail train to SeaTac. I wasn’t going to make Kathleen drive me all the way to the airport (a 90-minute round trip) without the carpool lane on the way home. And it’s Labor Day weekend, and the traffic I saw from the train looked pretty bad.
To take the train, we drive about 10 miles from the house to downtown Redmond. From there, it costs me exactly $1 to cross Lake Washington, transfer in Seattle, and head south to the airport. What a deal. The ride was good, but I am glad I boarded at the end of the line, since there were both a Mariners game and a Huskies game in Seattle. By the time we reached the International District station, where I changed trains to head south, it was packed.
As I write this, I am at the airport. It’s fun to fly an airline with only one daily flight from SEA. No lines. I walked up to the desk, asked a question, and headed to the lounge near the gate. I am flying Scandinavian Airlines, also known as SAS. We have never flown with them before, but they were the best option I could find. I have also never flown from here to Copenhagen, but that’s SAS’s home, so that’s where we are going.
This air travel experience wasn’t my usual one. Because Scott announced the workshop in mid-June, I had to buy my ticket three and a half months before the flight. Normally, I buy refundable tickets 11 months out, check them constantly, and re-ticket if the price drops. I did a bunch of searches in June, and this was the best price and schedule I could find. There were just a couple of things I didn’t like. First, the workshop ends with a late lunch on Friday, and our hotel rooms are good until Saturday morning. So I planned to fly back to Copenhagen on one of the first morning flights and then fly home. But if I did that on Saturday, the price went up by $1,200 compared to flying on Sunday. So I booked a hotel room near Copenhagen Airport, and I will fly up from Brussels on Saturday, spend the night, and come home a week from today.
The other thing I was unhappy about was that SAS wanted $480 for me to pick my seat before the flight. I passed on that because I am in business class, and how bad can it be? There are no middle seats. When I checked in yesterday, I found that I had been assigned a single-side window seat in row nine. Since row nine is the last row in business class, I will get off first. I am thrilled with that because I have a one-hour and 45-minute connection in Copenhagen. That seems like a long time, but I haven’t been to Europe since the new EES (Entry/Exit System) was instituted, which means that when I land in Copenhagen, I have to go through that process, including having my fingerprints scanned and my picture taken. If you have not entered the EU since it started, you will need to do that next time you go.
I have read online that the Danish are better at this than most other countries because their airport is smaller and they are more efficient. We have a WhatsApp text thread, and the people who flew in today and yesterday flew nonstop into Brussels from the US East Coast. Their wait time for EES was more than two hours. I won’t have to do that at all because I will have cleared it all in Denmark.
I really don’t want to miss my Brussels flight because we have a class dinner tomorrow night at 6:30 to kick off the class, and I would hate to miss it. After I land in Brussels, I have to take a train for about 70 minutes to Bruges. (BTW: It has been determined that it can be spelled Bruges or Brugges. I will try to stick to Bruges because my Mac has a limited number of Gs.) I already have my train ticket, and the station is on the airport’s lower level, so I should be OK.
I will have a full report for you tomorrow on how the flights went, maybe with pictures, since I have never flown SAS before. Their business class looks very nice in all the videos I’ve seen on YouTube. It will also be my first time flying the Airbus A350 (the equivalent of the 787), and I love flying on a new plane and a new airline. Always something to report on.
You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy plane tickets, which is kind of the same thing.” —Rick Steves
by Jim Bellomo | Sep 1, 2026 | Photography
Way back in 2002, Kathleen and I took our first international trip. To celebrate turning 50, we took a two-week trip to Italy. Before that journey, I had never been outside the United States, except for a short weekend trip to Canada for our first anniversary. Since then, we have visited so many places together (54 different countries, more than half the US, lots of Canada) that it seems strange to me that this coming Sunday, I will fly to Europe by myself. Kathleen and Keeley will hold down the fort here at home while I attend a photography workshop in Bruges, Belgium. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for years.
If you follow this blog, you know that I love to take photos. I like to think I am fairly good at it. Photography and processing the photos that I take is my favorite hobby, and the times I have spent wandering the streets of the world with a camera in my hand, creating my “art,” are some of my fondest memories. In the past few years, though, I have felt like my photographic vision is stuck. Africa in 2025 helped unstick it a little, but I need to move forward. I took my favorite photo in 2020. Time to take another. This brings me to my impending trip.
I’ve followed a particular photography/Photoshop guru for years. His name is Scott Kelby. He owns a company called KelbyOne, which is fairly well known in photographic circles. I have taken several of his Photoshop classes, some online and some in group settings with more than a couple hundred people in the room (this workshop has a maximum enrollment of 12). I always learned a lot, and his teaching style works for me. For years, he has offered small, hands-on workshops worldwide to improve your photography and post-processing. That’s right up my alley—travel and photography—two of my favorite things. Sadly, I’ve never been able to fit them into our schedule or budget. Plus, Kathleen and I still had so many places we wanted to go together that it just wasn’t a high priority. The thought of traveling without my travel partner was kind of unthinkable.
But Kathleen has known for a while that I would love to attend one of these workshops. She’s always told me to just go ahead and do one, and now we are OK on the money side; it’s just about fitting it into our schedules. Before I retired, I thought life would be simpler and more peaceful, but now it seems like I am even busier than I was when I was working. But when this one was announced and it fit into our schedule, I really thought about it. I was still torn between the cost and being gone for a week. But we discussed it, and she just kept telling me to “Go!!” So, I am going.
While we were on our Alaskan cruise, Scott announced another workshop, this one in Bruges, Belgium. I hemmed and hawed about it for a few days, and finally Kathleen told me again, “GO!” So I registered for the class, and as soon as we got back, I found the airfare (more about finding last-minute—under nine weeks—airfare to Europe, during these days of high jet fuel prices in my next post) and then, after I had the entire trip planned (about three days later), I got a little distracted by my cardiac health.
I won’t go into the entire story, but suffice it to say we have had a “fun” couple of months that included two Urgent Care visits, a ride in an ambulance with lights and sirens, so many medical tests I can’t count them, lots of pills to take and a procedure to shock my heart back into a normal rhythm. So much fun. But the good news is that I am back to feeling like my old self, and the doctor said I can go, even though I may have to have another procedure when I get back. For now, I feel great.
At this point, some of you may be asking, “Why isn’t Kathleen going with you?” Well, because she isn’t a photographer. And this is truly a photographic WORKshop. The schedule starts each day around 4:30 am, when the class of 12 meets to go out and shoot during the “Golden Hour,” when the light is best. Then they head back to the hotel for breakfast, then to the computer lab for the rest of the morning to process the photos they took earlier. After lunch, there are a few free hours to explore…or nap. Then as the day closes, it’s back out to shoot the evening “Golden Hour.” We finish up each night around 9:00 and drop into bed, exhausted. If Kathleen joined me on this trip, she would basically have me waking her up at 4:30 when I got up to go out shooting, and then she would just sit in the hotel and read, browse the web and do all the stuff she does at home, but in a foreign country in what would probably be an uncomfortable chair. So she had decided to stay here, do all that in her comfy chair, sleep in her own bed and take care of Keeley while I am gone from Sunday to Sunday.
This post is your notification that I am off on what I hope will be a very rewarding and exhausting trip that will hopefully give you some great photos of Bruges, Ghent and Brussels. I will do my best to post every day, but it may be just some of the best photos I take, with less text. As you can see from the daily schedule I described, it may be hard to fit in much writing. I do have a day and a half of travel to get home at the end of the week, so maybe that’s when I can catch up.
In the meantime, follow along and see if my photography gets better or just changes, hopefully for the better. PS: I didn’t take the photo at the top of this post. I “borrowed” it. More about the flight this coming weekend.
“You don’t take a photograph; you make it.”—Ansel Adams