Welcome to Marvels2014, my travel blog for our Round-the-World in 70 Days trip from March 31 to June 10, 2014. Author and professor Barbara Brodman and I have been planning it for almost a year now, and as we come down to less than two months before our departure, we're lining up the remaining hotel reservations, our balloon ride over Cappadocia, short flights not included in our overall flight package, etc.

Here's a link with more details: marvels2014—Round the World in 70 Days

We have several purposes for our journey. We're both travel addicts, and we'll be visiting places we've wanted to visit for most of our lives. Barbara will write about them, and I will photograph them and write about them. I have a long track record photographing geology, landscapes, archaeology, people in all kinds of situations, architecture, botanicals, and animals. I'll be photographing macro and panoramics (with a pano film camera). We want to show how anyone in good health can take a similar trip at our age (67 and 70), and that you can plan it yourself and be freer to wander and explore than you would be on an organized trip. Of course, you have to do more research, but there are now lots of ways to inform yourself so you don't miss major destinations in the countries you visit.

We'll also both be interviewing people we meet and videoing the interviews. My Canon 5D MarkIII is also a fine video camera, and I have a Rode microphone for good audio. I'll be asking anyone who'll talk to me in English or French a number of questions, including how things have changed in their country in their lifetime, the effects of globalization on their economy, on climate change on their weather, agriculture, water availability, and on the native flora and fauna, and what message they might want to send to the people of the US.

For a more vivid account of this travel project, please click here for my Indiegogo campaign video. I'm offering the disk of the interviews I collect as well as limited edition prints of various sizes (your choice from the 200 best) in exchange for modest financial help. These funds will go towards some of the expenses of the trip (by no means all), as well as the creation of a photo book on the project.

I welcome your comments. Feel free to spread the word to other travel addicts!

This is the composite image on my Indiegogo campaign page. Since I don't have my own photographs yet of the places we will visit, I put this together with analogous images. The woman is a friend I made in Jamaica last May. She was the spirit leader on an afternoon cruise. We developed a friendly connection, and I learned her life story. So she is the model of the kind of contacts I expect to make a lot of during this trip. The background photo that looks like a piece of exotic architecture is really the Palais idéal of Ferdinand Cheval, a French mail carrier, who spent 27 years constructing it in his back yard, finishing in 1912. It is considered a masterpiece of outsider architecture. The Book of Marvels cover is from a 1960 edition of this 1938 classic, which I read as a teenager, and which fueled my desire for travel. Please visit the Indiegogo page for more images and a complete summary of our itinerary: marvels2014—Round-the-World in 70 Days