Happy Friday, my friends! I’d like to celebrate the impending weekend with some end-of-fall photos—a perfect segue into winter, I guess, as we Chicagoans celebrated our first snowflakes of the season yesterday.

But the story behind these photos, I think, is even nicer than the results themselves. A few weeks back, I met up with the extremely talented Jacqui of Happy Jack Eats; we wanted to capture Morton Arboretum, in all its autumnal glory, on film. I took the train out to meet her, through new-to-me villages with sweet storefronts, and ended up having a blast. (I sincerely believe that the best part of moving to a new place has to do with the new relationships that follow. Between meeting lovely people like Jacqui and Maggie in person, hanging out with my hilarious coworkers, and reconnecting with high school and college friends, my heart has been quite full lately. So has my social calendar, but that’s something I can learn to live with.) We talked about photography and our futures, got ourselves just a little bit lost, ran into a troupe of zombie-actors, and had an extremely satisfying meal at Honey Cafe. Basically, there was no room for improvement.

So enjoy these snapshots (Portra 400 for the win!), then call up a friend. You know, just to chat. They make the transition from autumn into winter just a little bit less bittersweet.

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As I began my senior year of college—you know, when the only thought on anybody’s mind is “What’s next?”—I thought I had it all figured out. I’d be swooping myself right back to Chicago as soon as I removed my cap and gown, and that seemed to be that. I told my friends and roommates on every occasion that that the subject came up.

But somewhere between first and second semester, seeds of doubt were planted in my mind. I started tuning my ear to a weird internal dialogue that stemmed from a combination of outside influences and my own strange insecurities: “Isn’t the East Coast more cosmopolitan than the Midwest?” “Am I boring for wanting to return to the place where I was born?” Both statements look ridiculous on paper, of course, but can be strangely powerful when played over and over in the ear of a confused young adult. I may not have loved D.C. after spending four years in the place, but it was easy to second-guess myself, especially since most of my classmates were making post-graduate plans in Washington.

So when I met this cute guy and began falling in love, I convinced myself that Washington would be an okay place to hang tight, for a little while at least. If nothing else, it was neutral ground. And maybe the city with imprint me with its intrinsic D.C.-ness, thus bestowing upon me all those traits I had thought were lacking in myself—somehow, I’d become cosmopolitan, important, and powerful. Interesting. Worthy.

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Virginia, I love you. Passionately.

I’m reminded of that fact every time I visit Shenandoah, especially when it’s autumn and the bright leaves almost have me convinced there’s a forest fire spreading across the valley.

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Do you remember the end of the first season of Mad Men, when Don’s pitching an idea to the bigwigs at Kodak? He’s standing up by their Carousel slide projector, flipping through visions of his memories. “This is not a spaceship, it’s a time machine,” he said. “It goes backwards and forwards, and it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

I’ve felt like I was standing up beside a slide projector these past few weeks, clicking through memories. And I couldn’t stop thinking of Don’s words, how photos take us “to a place where we ache to go again.” Albums full of images aren’t just art or trophies; they’re the narrators of our life stories, aren’t they? I came back from Croatia with a fully-loaded digital camera, but that memory card was filled with nostalgia as much as data. I’ve taken my sweet time to recount my single week in the Balkans, but that act has forced me to nurture my sense of adventure. It’s reminded me that there’s something bigger than my current existence in the faceless, traffic-ridden suburbs of Washington: there’s magic and danger and exhilaration out there. You just have to decide to go after it.

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Summer is undeniably gone, having been swept away from Virginia over the course of a single rain-drenched week. One day, commuters at the nearby Metro suddenly appeared wrapped in coats, like someone had flicked on a light switch; I stride into work now with knit tights tucked into tall leather boots. For the first time in six months, my morning routine includes hot oatmeal. And on Saturday, a dear friend brought over pumpkin cupcakes to share. Pumpkin! Now that’s a harbinger of autumn if I’ve ever tasted one. The next afternoon, we warmed our first pot of spiced cider on the stove, throwing the heady scents of orange zest, cinnamon, and cloves into the air. (Air, by the way, which is no longer air-conditioned; I finally switched the thermostat to “heat,” and it kicked into gear with the faint smell of burning. It’s a little out of practice, I guess.)

As much as these wonderful developments should encourage me to embrace the here and now, I finally feel able to let in the first twinges of summer nostalgia. To be honest, I like the idea of summer more than the sweaty reality of it (although, granted, I seriously miss the incredible produce). So it’s now—when my alarm clock begins blaring in the pitch-black—that the memory of Hvar‘s beaches brings out an especially daydreamy quality in me, even as others are staring out their windows, waiting for the leaves to change.

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There was a point on our bus ride to Bosnia when the nose of our vehicle turned inland, and the now-familiar glasslike swath of the Adriatic was lost to a landlocked series of craggy mountains. We weaved through tall, rocky hills dotted with shrubs; shocks of green grass covered the ground in between. Suddenly, as if from the ether, the Neretva River appeared snaking between the hills, a radiant blue-green streak that we followed across the border, through towns composed of buildings stung by bullet holes, and straight into the bus terminal at Mostar.

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It started out as one of the more unassuming days of the trip: awakening to a cloud cover over the city and the steady pattering of raindrops; falling into a jetlagged, three-hour nap immediately after filling our bellies with breakfast pastries. And yet the day of our jaunt to the beaches at Brela stays with me, two and a half weeks later. It was the dark horse of Croatian excursions.

You can reach Brela via the local bus to Makarska, a small city an hour and a half south of Split. That afternoon, our bus wound its way tightly around jagged mountains that jutted into the sea, and holdover raindrops from that morning’s storm streaked intermittently across the Plexiglass window like furtive tears. The driver let us off on the side of the road, high above the water, and we walked down asphalt switchbacks until we found the pebbly beach we’d heard so much about.

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Ted and I have come to an arrangement: I’m the driver, he’s the navigator. Whereas Ted likes to pore over maps like he’s reading a novel, I look at them bemusedly as a sea of pretty dots and squiggles, pieces of art somehow but not really legible. And whereas Ted braces himself behind the wheel, confronting each turn as a stressful calculation, I ease into the driver’s seat and will happily cruise the highways until the gas tank nears empty. We each have our role, and really, it’s better that way.

Over the long weekend, we secured ourselves into the seatbelts of Bridget Honda, each in our rightful place, and headed toward West Virginia. I sighed with contentment as we crested each pretty rural hill, and Ted’s nose was buried in the road atlas as he studied the passing towns and landmarks.

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After much careful thought, and a particularly relaxing Saturday, I’ve decided that the theme of my summer should be “picnics and ponies.” Both elements offer a welcome escape to my youth, back when I was an equestrian hooked on all things horsey (Exhibits A and B: visits to the local racetrack and the Kentucky Derby; primary reading material vacillating between The Saddle Club series and the latest Dover Saddlery catalog), and had a back patio that cried out for simple outdoor meals. Fortunately, Virginia provides excellent opportunities to get back to these basics, as long as you’re willing to take a leisurely hour-long drive. Then, you can stake out a place at the best venue in horse country for both picnics and ponies—by which I mean the twilight polo matches at Great Meadow, in Middleburg.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not deterred by a country drive on traffic-free, tree-shaded roads, especially when I’m listening to the Allman Brothers Band and feeling dappled sunlight warm my forearms as I mark the miles in picket fences and grazing cows.

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I’m very picky about the temperature. I’m grumpy through the sizzling months of summer, require at least three layers before going sledding, and am a frequent complainer about overly air-conditioned offices no matter what the season. So it catches me entirely by surprise when the air outside is completely and utterly perfect, without any characteristic that could elicit a grumble from me. Today was one of those days where you’d be wonderfully comfortable if you wore shorts or jeans, if you were sitting on a park bench or jogging on the W&OD trail, parked at a red light with your windows down or happily speeding along with the breeze in your hair.

Thus, it was also one of those days where you can’t bear to be inside. I awoke with plans to make lemon-buttermilk cookies before picnicking, but standing by the oven today would’ve been a chore. So I ditched the kitchen for Great Falls National Park. Sixteen miles from home, this trip was a no-brainer: low-effort, low-cost, and high-reward.

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