Morning walks in strange places
Alone in the world, a man strolls through vineyards on a spring morning in Hallau, Switzerland.
Story and Photos by
By MATTHEW THAYER
Daybreak reveals an unvarnished truth about a place.
Roaming streets, docks and squares, you see a town before it has put on its makeup, before it has downed that second cup of coffee. Some rise with hangovers of gray skies and trash strewn on the sidewalks. Others shed their slumber full of promise and bathed in golden light.
With tourists few and far between at this early hour, sunrise is the domain of workers. Bakers and delivery people going about their business, merchants setting up stalls and farmers driving tractors through the mist. Mornings are as authentic as it gets.
With the Doge's Palace and Piazza San Marco in the background, a Venice streetsweeper is bathed in morning light.
As an early bird married to a woman who relishes sleeping in, I have developed a travel routine which has served us well from Honolulu to Venice. Each night before bed, I make a pile that includes: clothes, shoes, camera, key, phone and wallet. The next morning, as my spouse descends into deep REM sleep, I slip quietly out the door ready to explore. Hours later, I return with a tall, piping-hot Cafe Americano laced with two shots of espresso and a report on the day.
The photographer in me loves working with morning light. It's called the "golden hour" for a reason. The writer in me savors the people-watching, the moods and revelations. Winding my way down a narrow Venice alley early one morning, I passed beneath the window of a bakery. Enveloped in the scent of baking bread, I stopped to breathe it in. Leaning there against the wall, somewhere deep in the Castello neighborhood, I believed the memory would live forever. So far, so good.
The sun rises over hillside vineyards in Tuscany.
Morning walks are part exercise, part therapy, part scouting mission for the rest of the day. Since most drunks and rabblerousers are home abed, dawn is generally a time of calm and safety. Not always, however. Whether home or away, or wandering an urban core or dense forest, it always pays to be aware of your surroundings and to be alert to danger. How many people have been wiped out on vacation because they suspended their common sense? Sadly, we see it all the time in Hawaii.
A boater shares a morning smile while rowing across Marina di Puolo near Sorrento, Italy.
It was well after sunrise in Madrid when I found myself in the middle of a drunken, agitated group exiting a club. Tensions were thick on the sidewalk and some of that hostility began falling on me. Snapped from my reverie, sensing I was about to be caught up in a melee, I steeled for an attack.
"Just keep moving," I thought. And that's what I did. Free of the verbal jostling, my heart pounding, I passed through an arched walkway and found the famous Plaza Mayor virtually deserted.
And then there was the morning stroll in Anchorage when I came face-to-snout with a large black bear. I was cutting through a wooded city park on my way to a grocery store when the bear sprung from the bushes about 30 feet away. It stood on the trail and studied me for a long few seconds before my shouts of "Hey, bear! Hey, bear!" convinced it to turn and crash into the brush. If that doesn't wake a person up, nothing will.
Thousands of miles of experience say those are the exceptions. Whether you are a walker, jogger, bike rider or a traveler who pulls up a seat on a bench, mornings are the perfect time to take the pulse of the place you are visiting. Any conversation you happen into will probably be with someone who knows the area like the back of their hand. Not that there is a lot of idle chitchat going on. The city has yet to put on its makeup and that second cup of coffee is still brewing in the pot.
Sunrise reveals a land coated in frost on a November morning in Switzerland.
Red raspberries and strawberries glow in the morning sun at an open market in Nice, France.
Early morning joggers have Verona's usually bustling Piazza Bra nearly to themselves as they pass the Arena di Verona.
Dew drips from ripe olives on a foggy morning at Monte Vibiano in Umbria, Italy.
Morning fog clings to the towers of the Tuscan hilltop town of San Gimignano, Italy.
A pair of women in Venice pause a morning stroll to read on a bench. About 51,000 people live permanently in the Commune di Venezia, the main historical island city. It is estimated that up to 60,000 tourists visit each day, with 5.7 million arriving in 2023.
Sunrise comes early over Valdez Harbor in Valdez, Alaska, a place where the sun barely sets in the summer.
This sign was spotted after the author encountered the bear itself in a wooded public park in Anchorage, Alaska.
Morning commuters head to the harbor in Sorrento, Italy.
The sun rises over an Andalucian pasture in Los Canos de Meca, near the Trafalgar Lighthouse.
Barge deliverymen navigate Venice’s Grand Canal.
With Mt. Vesuvius in the background (left), the sun rises over Sorrento's harbor.