Personal | Jim & Kathleen Travel

The October Bunch Ride Again

by Jim Bellomo | Sep 23, 2026 | Uncategorized

Not sure if you remember this, but we have a group of six people who travel every October. We call ourselves the October Bunch. We have traveled together every October since 2023, when we sailed on Oceania’s Vista from Montreal to Miami. Since then, we have done river cruises on both the Douro in Portugal and the Columbia River. And since it is almost October, we are off to sail again with the Bunch.

The October Bunch includes me, Kathleen, my brother Steve (of the famous Steve test of restaurants), my sister-in-law Jamie, and our incredible Florida friends Mike and Cathy. Kathleen and I have been traveling with Mike since 2005, and I consider him one of my two best friends in the world.

This year, our trip will start in Chicago this Saturday, and we will spend four days touring the city. We haven’t been there together since 2013. (I was back in 2014 to deal with my youngest brother’s death, but that doesn’t count as a city visit. Jamie and Steve have been there most recently, and our other two Bunchers haven’t been there for more than 25 years.)This should be fun.

We are in Chicago from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday morning, when we rent a car and drive north to the home of cheese and beer—Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am pretty sure none of us have been there before. We stay two nights at a really cool hotel (which you will see when we get there). Then, on Friday morning, we board the Viking Octantis for a seven-night cruise that takes us to five of the six Great Lakes (we don’t get to Superior).

We are very excited about the cruise because, after all our years of cruising, this is an entirely new kind of ship we have never been on before. In fact, as cruise ships go, only two like it exist in the world: Octantis and her sister ship, Polaris. Octantis holds only 374 passengers in 187 staterooms, so it is much smaller than a Viking Ocean ship and larger than a Viking River boat.

As an expedition ship, she spends most of the year in either the Arctic or the Antarctic. On the way between her two main destinations, she visits the Great Lakes and the Caribbean. This gives us a chance to check her out. She has a lot of very cool gear, including Special Operations Boats for exploring, Zodiacs, and even two six-man submarines (John and Paul). The ship has a scientific lab for oceanic exploration.

You can see our route at the top of this page. We love where this cruise ends… when we sail into Lake Ontario (NOT Lake America) and disembark in Toronto, one of our favorite cities. We will spend the night so we can see our good friends Tim and Perry. It’s been way too long since we last saw them.

That’s the coming two weeks. I will be blogging away, and as always, I will have photos. I hope to use what I learned in Belgium two weeks ago on this trip.

“An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore, an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.” —Reinhold Messner

Finished and Collapsed

by Jim Bellomo | Sep 12, 2026 | Photography

As I write this, we are done. The class is over and we have had our farewell lunch. I am not sure when I will get this posted online but as tired and drained as I am it probably won't get finished until tomorrow when I am in the airport lounge waiting for my flight to Copenhagen.

We did the slog from hell yesterday. I woke up a little before 2:00 am., couldn’t get back to sleep, and my legs were cramping from all the walking the day before. We had to meet up at 5:00 to catch the train to Brussels. Scott and Mimo had hired taxis to get us to the train station, so we made the 5:19 train. It took about 90 minutes to get back to Brussels. Once there, we took taxis to the city center, where we shot photos for a little while. The panorama at the top of this page is from our first stop—Brussels' main square.

After shooting there for about 40 minutes, we walked a ways and had breakfast at a cafeteria-style restaurant nearby. Then we completely switched to a different subject matter for the rest of our time in Brussels. Up until then, our photography had focused on historical Belgium. Yesterday (once we were done shooting in the very early morning), we switched to ultra-modern. You will see it in my photos below.

We first took a subway ride to a very cool subway station and shot there for about half an hour. Then we took two subway rides and stopped at Atomium, a science center/museum all about the elements, housed in the pretty cool building you see at right. Inside those spherical shapes were all kinds of exhibits and light shows and more. You went up to the very top to start and worked your way back down again. In each round sphere were science, music and light experiments we could photograph and use to capture interesting patterns and lighting. It was kind of cool but not my usual kind of photography. There are some photos from inside the gallery below.

After we finished touring the Atomium, Scott picked up the tab for a panini sandwich and a drink for everyone at the Atomium snack bar. We ate quickly and were back on the subway in no time, heading back to the train station for our train ride to Antwerp. I thought I would show you a quick map of all the places we went on our Belgian slog today.

In Antwerp, it was more of the same. Scott and Mimo gave us some great ideas for photos in the train station, and then we took another taxi ride to a kind of cool building with an 11-story spiral staircase you could look up or down. By the time we got there, all I wanted was to get back to the hotel and go to bed. I certainly did not want to spend an hour while people took way too many photos of a spiral staircase. I told Scott I'd let others shoot it, and I asked if he knew where the restroom was. He told me to take the elevator to level B of the building, look around, and I would find it. There was no restroom on level B. You know what was on level B? The bottom of that damn spiral staircase. So as long as I was there, I took a couple of photos and ended up using one of them for my afternoon critique the next day. And of course Scott had to rub it in the entire time.

Our last stop in Antwerp was way out at the port, where a very modern building sits atop a very old one. The new building looks like a glass ship perched on the original port building. The best way for me to describe it is for you to see it. It is in my photos below, and the shot with the sun creating a star inside the crook of the building was the one I submitted for the Best of the Week contest.

We shot at that location for almost an hour. To be honest, I had all the photos I wanted from every angle within minutes of getting there. But we had to hang around while some people shot the building and everything around it for an hour or so. TOTALLY EXHAUSTED. Finally, we got back in our taxi and fought our way through Antwerp rush hour to the train station, where we had to wait about an hour for a train back to Bruges. Everyone got snack bar food for dinner, and we boarded the train around 7:30. We were back in Bruges by 9:00 and, thankfully, in bed by 9:30.

As many of you know, I walk a lot. Before my recent cardiac scare, I was walking four to six miles a day. But this day, which started at 5:00 and finished at 9:00 and included 16,000+ steps, just about killed me. I am still feeling it. Not because of the walk, but because of the 22 lb backpack I am carrying with all my photo gear. Scott warned us not to bring too much, but then he said, “Bring a tripod, a platypod, your camera with your main lens, a really wide-angle lens if you have one, and a few other things.” My back will probably hurt for a week after that day.

Thank the gods we only had one more day to go.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”— Kurt Vonnegut

OMG—I Missed A Day

by Jim Bellomo | Sep 11, 2026 | Photography

Seriously, the last six days have been so absolutely crazed that about 10 minutes ago, sitting on my hotel bed in Bruges on Saturday morning, I suddenly realized the post I was writing was about what we did on Thursday, not that I had totally missed writing about Wednesday. The week has been like that. Just when you think you remember everything, you realize you have missed an entire day. That’s crazy! With a capital C.

There is a fix for this: write about it now. So… we met in the lobby at 5:00 am. We took taxis to the train station and caught the 5:30 train to Ghent. We arrived at the main Ghent station at 6:10 and took taxis to St. Michael’s Bridge to get photos of Hogwarts in the Golden Hour. If you aren’t a Harry Potter fan, Hogwarts is the school he attends, and it is quite the spooky castle. The oldest areas of Ghent truly look like Harry Potter lives there. See the photo above if you don't believe me.

This was another chance for me to get friendly with my new travel tripod. It gets easier every time. I’m getting a little more used to all the things I need to do to get my BlackRapid strap off, the tripod plate on, the legs extended, the camera attached to the tripod head, the head leveled, focus set, and then shoot. On our first morning, it took me about 15 minutes (everyone else who was used to working with tripods took about three minutes), but on Wednesday morning in Ghent, I did it in about seven minutes…while standing on a bridge, watching for bikes and cars coming in both directions. It seemed like we had designated watchers who would yell loudly as cars and bikes approached so we could get out of the way. One problem with this system is that, in that dark space, the exposure times were usually 30 seconds or more. So you just push the shutter, it starts taking the photo, and you can’t move the camera and tripod until those 30 seconds are up. If a car or a bike is headed your way, 30 seconds feels like 30 minutes.

We took these incredible photos of Ghent for about an hour, then it was back in the vans, back to the train station, back to Bruges, into cabs to the hotel, drop your gear in your room, run downstairs to breakfast, eat, back upstairs to get our computers, back to the meeting room to start processing photos and to have Scott and Mimo give us tips and teach us techniques for processing until around noon, when we would turn in our best photos to Scott. He would put them on the big screen, and we would all see them and offer critiques. I have to say, it is amazing how many great photographers there are in this group. I also have to say that this is NUTS, and no wonder I can’t remember which day came before which other day.

After the critiques, anyone who wanted lunch went to eat, while others, gluttons for punishment, went back out to shoot Bruges some more. The rest of us took naps, which didn’t help our internal clocks adjust to Belgium time one iota. Around 5:00, I would get up and see if anyone else wanted an early dinner (since we had skipped lunch). I usually had some takers, so we would head out to find a nearby restaurant and eat. After dinner, we would meet back in the lobby at 6:30, grab a cab, and go out somewhere else to shoot.

Another crazy thing about Bruges is its one-way streets and bridges. On our evening shoot, we went to a beautiful spot with a restaurant and an old mill, and I got some shots I loved. Then Scott had planned to take us all to a small village to shoot a windmill at sunset, but he and Mimo could only find one taxi, which took the first six people (Scott went with them so he could pay the cab driver) to the village with the windmills. The rest of us waited with Mimo while he ordered Uber after Uber, but none showed up. He ordered cabs, but none came. Finally, after the sun had completely set, we gave up. But we wondered how we would get back to the hotel. Our local guide, Andy (an awesome fellow), said the hotel was about a 15-minute walk away. We were awestruck. How could that be? The cab ride to get to the shoot had taken almost half an hour. But that’s because of those one-way streets. We all walked back to the hotel and went to bed. Because, as you will see in my next post, Thursday was the day from hell.

I am going to try to add captions to the photos in the gallery below, and I apologize for not having captions on my earlier galleries. It was more important to keep up with posting than to add captions to essentially cool pics. Don’t forget: if you click the first shot, you can scroll through using your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE… don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

“Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.” — Peter Adams

It Gets Better Every Day…and More Exhausting

by Jim Bellomo | Sep 9, 2026 | Uncategorized

If you liked yesterday's photos, you will love these. But the schedule is killing us all. Today will be the real backbreaker. We have to be in the lobby at 5:00 am, and we won’t be back at the hotel until 9:00 pm. No classroom work today, no breakfast at the hotel. Lunch on the run. We are taking a 90-minute train ride back to Brussels, shooting there, and then on to Antwerp for the second half of the day. Scott is buying us a quick breakfast and lunch on the road.

I did want to use the photo above to show you what the group looks like when we hit a spot where we want to take pictures. We kind of take over the area . But we are very polite about it and all of us volunteer to take family and couples photos who want get a photo of what we are shooting with them in it.

The photos below are from our first evening shoot on Tuesday. Scott hired a model, dressed her in a medieval dress his wife picked out, and we shot portraits and more. I have never shot a model before, and it was a different experience.

Then we went to the spot where I took the photo at the top of my post yesterday. It’s one of those “if you come to Bruges, you have to take this shot” kind of places. We shot there for a while, and I used an ND filter successfully for the first time. I have just never been a tripod person, and you have to use one to do it because my exposure was something in the neighborhood of two minutes. BTW: Did you know that a two-minute exposure (when you are trying to shoot a bunch of shots) lasts almost half an hour…or at least it seems like it does ?. But the difference in the shots is how the water and sky look, because both are moving while the rest of the photo is still.

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” — Dorothea Lange

I Am Back…Photographically

by Jim Bellomo | Sep 9, 2026 | Photography

Not back home, just back photographically…I hope. There are some great photographers on this trip, and that is pushing me, but it’s Scott and his buddy Mimo who are really the drivers here.

A perfect example of how Scott pushed me yesterday helped me get my best photo of the trip…so far. His instruction to us before we left the hotel was “bring everything.” That meant our tripods, our platypods, our filters, any extra lenses we had brought, rain covers for our cameras, and a bunch more. So I did. At the very first stop, I learned that I hate tripods. I mean, I really hate them. By the end of the first shoot, I had put mine away and said to heck with it. Maybe if I had practiced with it more? Just getting it set up is a royal pain in the ass. I like shooting handheld and adding exposure later in post-processing (Photoshop and Camera RAW). So pretty much all but the first shots in the slideshow below are handheld.

Then last night we shot a bunch of stuff, and again, I was carrying the tripod (because that was what we were supposed to do). When we got to our final stop, everyone was setting up with their ND filters (you have to use a tripod to shoot with a filter on… the exposure is too long not to), and I wasn’t. Scott came up to me and asked if I had a filter. I did, and he said I would regret it like crazy if I didn’t use it. I was reluctant because it meant at least 10 minutes getting set up for the shot. I am not that kind of photographer. I'm the kind of guy who says, “I love this photo, but I will love the next one more.” I just want to keep shooting. But I set up the tripod, and with Mimo’s help, I got the shot I am most proud of so far. It’s the one at the top of this post.

It is Wednesday morning at 3:45 am. I have to be ready to go in the lobby at 5:00 when we take a train to Ghent. But that’s tomorrow’s story.

Today is about yesterday, our first day of shooting. Our daily schedule looked like this:

Meet in the hotel lobby at 6:00.
Walk to our first shoot (about a mile).
Shoot for 20 minutes, walk to the next shoot.
Back to the hotel at 9:00 for breakfast.
Classroom work and processing from 9:45 to 2:00.
Nap or play time until 6:30.
Back out to shoot again until 9:00, and then back to the hotel to sleep.

Tired yet? I’m not. Yesterday morning was good; last night was WONDERFUL! So, how about some photos? I won't add captions, since I want to get them on tonight before I go to bed. We have to meet in the lobby at 5:00 am tomorrow, and we won't be back until 9:30 at night. We are headed to Brussels and Antwerp.

You can look at them photographically or because you want to see more of Bruges, but either way, if you click the first shot, you can scroll through using your arrow keys or by swiping. And PLEASE... don't look at these photographs on a phone. Please...