Yesterday’s photo question was a trick, of course: It wasn’t taken on my vacation, it was taken out of an airplane window on my way to my vacation. In fact, I shot it pretty close to home: the mountains in the picture are part of the Coast Range in San Diego, peeking out from an early-morning marine layer.

Several people figured this out, more or less. Several other people guessed that it was a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which was wrong in fact but right in spirit. On Monday I drove down Virginia’s Skyline Drive as a warmup, and for the rest of the week I’ll be driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway. This is part of my usual photographic strategy: choose subjects so beautiful that all you have to is randomly point your camera around and you’re all but guaranteed to get some great shots.

I flew into Washington DC on Sunday and stayed the night with my sister-in-law and her wife. They gave me a whirlwind tour of our nation’s monuments after dinner, and I’ll probably share them eventually even though you can buy postcards that are just as good. Today’s photo was taken at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and shows MLK staring down the Washington Memorial. I assume this placement is a coincidence, but it seems oddly appropriate.

May 6, 2019 — Washington DC
May 6, 2019 — Washington DC

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

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