September 2023 afforded me the opportunity to visit Europe for the first time since 2008 when a dear family friend decided to get married in Croatia, right on the heels of my having planned to check out Oktoberfest celebrations with some German-learnin’ nerds I knew in New Orleans.

I wound up booking the trip rather wackily– found a $300 ticket to Geneva with lengthy daytime layovers in Ft. Lauderdale and then London that I thought would serve as mini vacations of sorts (even as the London portion found me traveling largely on foot to get between the train stations servicing Gatwick and Luton airports with a quickly dying phone, on my birthday!)

(Which was still far less stressful than learning at the last minute, in the Ft. Lauderdale airport, that my flight to London actually departed from Miami, a change that had been made that week and not relayed to me by my 3rd-party booking site!)

(A $65 Uber to Miami and the assistance of another passenger whose connection was late got me on the flight even after check-in had technically ended!)

Anyway, here’s things I saw in my trek across London, + one from Ft. Lauderdale as lagniappe:

And then Geneva was a sort of incidental stop on my journey– it was the destination of the cheapest ticket I could find, and I had romantic notions of taking a scenic train from there to my actual destination of Stuttgart. The rail schedule did not work out so favorably as to allow that, so I really just arrived at my hostel late and made my way to the lake before dawn to do some putzing about and get a coffee and croissant before heading back to the airport. It was remarkably hard to find that breakfast (the train station ultimately provided), but I got a couple nice shots on a peaceful Swiss morning. Which I guess is kind of the nature of Switzerland, and presumably its mornings.