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 we roll through July, and the office empties out with coworkers gone fishin’, I’ve been forced to come to terms with a certain unfortunate fact: I’m not going on vacation this year.

Since I’m only three months into work with my new employer, I haven’t been gifted with any days off yet (I’ll have to wait for the six- and twelve-month marks till that happens—and what glorious days those will be!). It could be a whole lot worse, since I’ll end up with eighteen days of paid leave once the year is through—um, yes please? But as Tom Petty so eloquently put it: “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Weekend trips are out, too, as I recently passed my beloved old Bridget Honda on to a new owner. Again, no complaints: I’m elated that $4.50/gallon gasoline, car insurance premiums, and repair bills aren’t draining my bank account any longer. It means, however, that I won’t be leaving Chicagoland for a very long time, as enchanting a land as it may be.

When you have no time, no transportation, and no resources, you dream. So allow me to fantasize a bit about future vacation days, will you?

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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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Somehow, enough time has crept up on me that I’ve been able to establish two fall traditions as a resident of Virginia. They include, for one, a pre-Halloween trip with Ted’s family to a haunted forest, one that’s about an hour outside of Richmond and squarely in the middle of nowhere. After sunset, we take back roads to a huge cornfield framed by dark forest and, probably, serial killers. We board a hayride bound for the middle of that cornfield, where we’re dropped off and left to fend for ourselves. Stumbling our way through a corn maze, we pass a roaring bonfire that marks the entrance to the haunted forest.

It’s a setup that poises you to react like a high-strung Thoroughbred before a big race, ready to shy away at the drop of a feather. So we trot and high-step our way through barely-lit abadoned houses, accompanied by soft but pulse-quickening horror-movie music, accosted and pursued by entirely too many deranged-looking men with chainsaws. Both years, Ted’s family has laughed at me for screaming so loudly. And that’s all I have to say about that.

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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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From the outset, our hope for Split was that it would be a Croatian home away from home. Home, that is, in the sense that recalls a place of comfort and refuge—and we certainly got our wish. But I know too well that home is a shade of gray, a place that’s wearing new clothes every time you leave or come back to it. So it was with Split, a charming, magical little city that comforted and surprised us over the seven days we lived there.

On our bus ride from the airport into town, we gazed out the windows with bleary eyes, predisposed to feel who-knows-what about the place. Our trans-Atlantic flight had been like commuting via day spa, with the red-lipsticked flight attendants providing hot towels and hot meals with a smile, and refilling our water and wine glasses before we’d even reached the bottom. Yes, we were starting to feel optimistic about Europe. But we hadn’t seen more than blurry Wikipedia pictures of Split itself—chosen more for geographic convenience within the country than for anything else—and after so much traveling, we were verging on cranky. At first glance, our chosen destination seemed to offer a heavy dose of Eastern Europe: imposing Soviet-style high-rises dotted the outskirts of town (which Ted brightly deemed “less depressing” than their Russian cousins). But breaking through a cluster of cinder-block apartments, the Adriatic suddenly appeared like an oasis, shimmering azure below a coastline backed by craggy mountains. There was Italy, too, in these streets—lots to be had, we’d soon find, in the Roman architecture of Split’s old town, on the hairline curves of the coastal roads, and every night on our dinner plates.

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