I love to travel. The Wanderlust is a core part of who I am. I was born "overseas," as a child, I moved every three years or so, and when "overseas" my family travelled for vacation as often as possible.
One natural consequence of travel is to come home with photos to remind us of the good times we had and the interesting places we saw. Technology makes it easy to take as many pictures as we want. However, I've found that looking through a screen at the things that are immediately around me forces a one-step remove from the actual experience. I intentionally try to limit my screen time while on vacation; after all, why would I travel halfway across the planet just to be online? But, despite my best efforts to analogize, I'm often sucked into the camera eye and miss the saturation of experience that can occur while I am immersed in a new place. So, I've made efforts to limit how many pictures I take while travelling. Of course, I'll take some photos, but whereas I might have taken a hundred photos a day in the past, I've tried to limit myself to something more like half of that. Even then, I have a lot of photos to "dump".
This last April, I was able to travel to Germany for work. After this, my wife and I took a week-long stay in Belgium. We were "stationed" in Antwerp - our Air BnB was literally 100 feet from the train station - and travelled out to Ghent, Bruges, and up to The Hague, Netherlands. I took a lot of pictures that week, as Belgium has some of the most beautiful architecture I've ever seen. When I look at the photos on my phone, I'm overwhelmed. So, I am trying to parse out these photographs into batches that are a little more digestible in order to blog a bit more clearly about my trips.
We'll start with Castle Gravensteen, AKA Castle of the Counts in Ghent. I'll include pictures of the castle itself in another post (or posts).
Being a dutiful D&D nerd, of course I toured the castle! And, of course, I took photos of some of the weapons displayed there. This shows maybe half of the weapons there (again, I tried to limit pictures so I could actually enjoy the experience in the moment). For you other D&D nerds, hopefully this will provide some inspiration for your own games. Or, perhaps you might just enjoy the beauty of these killing tools.
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