“To Travel Hopefully” is Taking a Pause: Please stay healthy, and see you on the other side!

Dear Readers,

For more than three years it has been my pleasure and privilege to provide daily content to inspire, educate, and inform on all topics related to travel photography. During these challenging times, as the COVID-19 pandemic brings most discretionary travel to a halt in most of the world, I’m feeling torn: on the one hand, it seems frivolous and a bit tone-deaf to continue publishing a travel photography blog when nearly all members of our community (including myself) are grounded for the foreseeable future; while on the other hand, I do hear from readers that these daily posts are enjoyable and informative even in the absence of imminent travel possibilities.

This is a challenging time for all of us. As a full-time professional photographer whose business consists primarily of travel assignments, capturing the performing arts, and face-to-face teaching, I am now effectively shut down and making no revenue. I’m relatively fortunate compared to many others: my business can survive for up to a few months, while many gig economy and other service workers will lose everything in just a few weeks or days. If you have steady employment and a regular paycheck, give thanks, but also please remember to help those who may be less able to weather this storm. Particularly for many in the travel and arts industries, the next few weeks will likely present an existential threat. I know we all want these industries to be strong still when we all emerge from the current situation.

For now, I’ve decided to give “To Travel Hopefully” a hiatus and resume publishing when the current public health crisis has subsided and normal travel can be resumed. We’ll be back, hopefully soon, with some all-new content based on my recent adventures covering the Carnival in Venice (just before the Coronavirus outbreak shut down the festivities) and travel in Slovenia and Croatia, as well as with some of your favorite pillar posts from our archives.

In the meantime, if you’re hankering for a”To Travel Hopefully” fix, just search the archives for some topics of interest or pick a random month or date to peruse some previous posts.

I would like to hear your thoughts about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on your life and your relationship to travel and photography, as well as your ideas about where we can go with “To Travel Hopefully”. Please leave your comments at the end of this post.

I truly appreciate your ongoing enthusiasm for what we’re doing here at “To Travel Hopefully”–building a community based on a shared passion for travel photography and its power to build bridges between people and cultures around the world. Stay healthy, watch over those who are vulnerable medically and financially, and see you soon on the other side!

I’ll leave you with a few favorite images of Venice’s Carnival just before the first COVID-19 cases were diagnosed and the celebrations cut short.

Kyle

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