Fargo, North Dakota.

Well, Fargo, if you go by where the photo above was captured and where this post is being written as opposed to where we are supposed to be when this post publishes on October 24, 2021.

Long Beach, California.

If you go by where Lynn and I will be on that date. On that date, in 1970, Lynn and I were in a small church in Fairmont, Minnesota. We cemented our future together 51 years ago. If all goes well, and we pass the pre-boarding Covid test, we’ll be finding our cabin on the Norwegian Bliss. This cruise will replace the anniversary cruise we’d planned for our 50th anniversary in 2020. Needless to say, that cruise never happened.

Since retiring, our goal has been to travel, and we’ve kept that promise, even in 2020 when we did an 8,000 mile (12,875 km) road trip through the greater western U.S. We traveled with my niece and her husband and our group kept to ourselves exploring the great outdoors, having restaurant meals outdoors, or delivered to our hotel rooms and generally did what we needed to do to keep safe.

As this is being written in early September, we are getting ready for another fall road trip. We will travel more scenic byways, visit places we didn’t see in the states we visited last year, and added four additional states to the itinerary. We’ll be stopping in Colorado in mid-September to attend a family wedding. Though we are now all fully vaccinated, we will still be careful not to pick up a breakthrough infection that could spoil our anniversary cruise, and I will look forward to sharing the travels with you over the next year.

About the photo: I call them our collection of crazy frames. Many years ago, we took a cruise on Lake Superior at Duluth. We stopped at a gift shop and saw the Duluth photo frame with three cruise ships in the lower row of frames. It was an impulse buy, but eventually, we added another crazy frame from Albuquerque where we completed a hot air balloon ride. These frames have greatly simplified our souvenir shopping. When we get to a city or an attraction that we’ve never visited before, we get someone to take a cellpic of us and purchase an appropriate crazy frame.

There are now over 60 in our collection and I know we’ll be adding more on our fall trip and cruise this year. We even have a solution when we cannot find a frame that specifically identifies the area we are visiting. We can usually find a crazy frame with features representing the general area. I then use a photo processing program to add text to the image being printed so the image identifies the location.

The downside of this hobby is that we now have four bookcases full of crazy frames, and I only have a handful of empty spaces for more frames. I don’t have much more room to add any more bookcases… but we aren’t going to let that keep us from traveling. Many more journeys are yet to come, I hope.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment.

John Steiner