Motivation
This travel blog is dedicated to places I’ve visited which are not commonly included in travel plans.
These are mainly of two types:
- Public access places, typically museums, open-air sites or pieces of architecture, which can be visited alone or with a guide, but are not voluntarily hidden from visitor’s eyes. Reports on very specialistic or less-known museums on topics I find of interest, as well as from travel experiences like sightseeing flights, belong to this category.
- Wild or ‘ghost’ places, like abandoned relics of WWII or the Cold War, where nothing is shown publicly – and sometimes everything is kind of voluntarily ‘hidden’ from visitor’s eyes. Here you have to find the site and explore it totally on your own.
The topics covered are those matching my personal interests, which include aviation, warships, missiles, forts, tanks, engineering, war history, architecture, and more!
I spend hours preparing my trips, surfing the web and buying all the necessary paper guides and literature to gather all necessary info before being there. I don’t ask travel agencies, I like to set up plans exactly as I like! I put on this website everything I think useful to know about the places I’ve visited – this way hopefully saving some time in the preparation of your own visit!
My pages are full of photographs – I took all of them, except some historical shots from some books – as clearly stated case by case in the website for copyright reasons… I find pictures help much to convince you to visit or to skip an attraction. With my pics I try to give a detailed overview of what you can find in the places listed on this website.
This website was launched in September 2016, but some of the material in it has been collected since as far back as 2009. Anyway the year of my visit is always specified in my posts and in the copyright mark on the photographs, to help verifying the currency of the information provided.
About the Author
I am an associate professor in a prominent technical University, where I’m working on topics of aircraft dynamics and aircraft design, as well as energy production systems.
I have a lifelong passion for aviation, I own a private GA licence and I fly regularly in this category. I often attend airshows.
I’m an amateur photographer, I’ve started with a Canon EOS 500D in 2009, and some 100’000 shots later I’ve transitioned to a Canon EOS 70D.
I’ve been traveling to many foreign destinations since my childhood with my parents, and independently after the school years. I was greatly impressed by the deep contrast between the two sides of the Iron Curtain on some travels to Europe as a kid, soon after Communism had ‘left the region’, and since then many trips of mine are Cold-War-themed. But I’ve a general interest for traces and relics of all wars and ‘momentous events’, especially those from the 20th century. I like photographing also architecture and nature.
I travel in very small groups of well-known people, and I preferably go alone on exploration missions of ‘forgotten sites’.
I’ll be more than happy to share with interested people more than is on this website, so please feel free to contact me if you think I can provide useful info for planning your trip! Just contact me if you are interested, or you would like to have more pictures.