Desi and I both kept a watchful eye for interesting birds to photograph, and across Europe ended up with a few. Many ended up just being pigeons, but it was fun all the same. There are quite a few birds (especially from London) that I hadn’t seen before, so that was a real treat. But my absolute favourite would have to be this little duckling:

Today I had a day off, something unfortunately rare for me right now. I made the most of it though – sleeping in, relaxing, and taking photos. I went down to Kempenfelt Bay here along Barrie’s lake shore, hoping to find some open water. The open water attracts ducks, and with the warm weather it seemed likely. I was right:

For this photo, I tried something a little different. I set my camera down on the ice, a foot from the edge of the water. I set it on a timer to take a photo every 25 seconds, and walked a safe distance away so the ducks would gather around. The photos that resulted were random, but with some interesting results. I’ll take to try it again! I also attempted to get some flight shots, such as this:

More duck photos in the gallery below, but the one above is my absolute favourite from today. Its really hit or miss with these photos, you simply have to have patience and take LOTS of photos to chance on the good ones. At least, that’s how I do it.

After taking enough duck photos to satisfy me, I drove to one of the local wooded areas for a brief nature walk. It was here that I found a few nice scenes worth capturing:

And another interesting shot from the forest floor in the middle of winter:

It was a great day, I need to have these days more often.

I took many photos of flowers through Europe, both wild and garden-variety. We found ourselves along a few forested paths in our travels. These paths were full of various wildflowers in bloom, and I took the time to photograph as many as I could. These flowers were found all across Europe, from Varna to London. See how many you can recognize!

I’ve had a few people complain the blog was starting to slow down, so I have removed the google maps from the Europe posts to see if that was the issue. If you were previously experiencing a slow-down and now its better, please let me know.

Also, if you still want to see much of the photos as they are geotagged, you can still find the full map here.

Our trip through Europe was a fantastic experience, including all of the different foods and drinks we tried. Many of the dishes in Bulgaria were familiar to Desi, but nearly all were new to me. I’m sure we both enjoyed trying new foods throughout our travels, even when we didn’t know exactly what we were getting: