Due to COVID19, my traveling rhythm went down from an avg 90% the last six years, to 0%. I have never been that much at home without travel than in these last 5 weeks (and a few more to come).
While the primary reason for my travel is business related, every now and then, I have the opportunity to enjoy the area, if even only for a short moment, or in-between delivering sessions. Some locations immediately coming to mind:
- Johannesburg, South Africa (Lion & Rhino Park)
- Kathmandu, Nepal (overall scenery and the top of the mountains)
- Seattle, WA, USA (Harbor area, boat trip, Snoqualmie Falls)
- Ischl, Austria (Closing of skiing season, hiking at the top of the mountains)
- Bangalore, India (Shivoham Shiva Temple)
- Bay St Louis, MI, USA (Airbnb stay for 80 days, loved everything)
- …
and probably another +100 locations at least.
What should be clear about those locations, is they are all beautiful, especially the scenery of nature, sometimes it’s extraordinary buildings and most often it’s both (outside of the great and awesome training experiences)
So no doubt about it, I’m missing traveling. Missing the walks, the drive-by’s, the “enjoying my trip” feeling.
And that’s where I discovered an interesting but yet little gem to install on my laptop: Bing Desktop Wallpaper “Exploring the world, one photo at the time”.
If you have been using Bing as your search engine, or you had the joys of owning a Windows Phone in the past, you pretty well know what I’m talking about: Beautiful, stunning pictures from anywhere in the world, changing every day.
By installing this tool on your Windows machine, it will show a different image on your desktop wallpaper every morning when starting your laptop. It also stores these images on your machine (C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\BingWallpaperApp\WPImages), so you can reuse them later on, if you don’t like the one from a given day :).
While it is no substitute for the real-life experiences out there, it takes me away every now and then, dreaming for a few seconds about so many unexplored destinations that still need Azure training workshops to be delivered there.
Stay safe and healthy you all!
/Peter