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| 9/23/26 On the light rail to the airport |
The San Francisco Bay Area offers me an ideal mix of family,
friends, and fantastic sketching opportunities, yet I rarely visit (the last
time was in 2018 when we were on our way to Yosemite). I just got back from eight
days there, and I plan to visit more regularly in the future. Late September
seems to be an ideal time to visit, weather-wise. While Seattle is definitely
turning toward fall, the Bay Area was a lovely extension of summer.
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| 9/23/26 Lunch while waiting for my flight at SEA. Later in the day, I wrote private thoughts at the bottom of the pages that I cropped out here. It's an easy solution to sharing some parts of a journal page without sharing everything. |
Although I have several posts planned organized by city, I’m
going to begin with select pages from my travel journal. A recent review of my fitness-walk sketches disappointed me because I haven’t been writing as
much in my sketch journal as I have wanted to. With that in mind, I made an effort
to write alongside my sketches during my week away, which wasn’t difficult,
since I do tend to write more when I’m traveling. I didn’t bring along my
long-form written journal, so in the evenings, I often wrote a couple of pages
of impressions and thoughts in the travel journal. My daily-carry Uglybook
functioned exactly as my travel journals have in the past.
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| 9/23/26 At lower left is my habit tracker of step count, hours walked, and walking duration, which are things I usually record in my long-form written journal. |
I also consciously used these eight days as a “dry run” for
longer trips I hope to make in 2027. I’m fairly set on media choices, but the
question is always paper. Through 2019 (the last time I traveled internationally),
I was binding travel sketchbooks myself, but I’ve decided not to do that going
forward. So, the question now is, How many and which sketchbooks would I want
to bring for, say, a 12- or 15-day trip? I’m sure I’ll be muttering and musing over
that question for many months to come, so I won’t start here, but I’ll just say
that this short-ish trip was helpful in clarifying my needs. Regardless of
location or duration, I doubt my sketching approach would change much. |
| 9/25/26 As always, sushi was my favorite food to draw! And I ate a lot of it (all fantastic) while staying in San Jose's Japantown neighborhood. |
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| 9/25/26 Caltrain rider. One issue I have with including lengthy writing is that I tend to use whatever pen I made that sketch with, which is often a brush pen. It takes much longer to write legibly with a brush pen than a marker with a fine tip (such as used below). I'd rather not use a brush pen, but usually I forget to switch pens. |
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| 9/25/26 Palo Alto |
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| 9/27/26 Berkeley playground |
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| 9/30/26 Everything I ate on this day except breakfast in my Airbnb |
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| 10/1/26 Rider on my light rail ride home. I like how this last page and the first page in my journal (top of post) are both about how I relate to other light rail passengers. They unintentionally form nice book ends for the rest of my trip. |
