Collecting travel memories, one print at a time

There are moments that travel gives you: not the whole trip, just pieces of it. We started using candid photos we took on our own family trips and turning them into images worth keeping and making them visible around our own house. As a plus, they've turned out to make great travel decor for everyone else, too.

The Stopover Series started as an attempt to hang onto those moments: Chicago, New York, Seattle, Tokyo, Paris, Rome. Not the postcard version of each city, but the version we actually stood in. Our photo, a few quiet minutes to ourselves, then hours of drawing until the color and the light felt right. That part of the process hasn't changed much from print to print.

That's still the whole reason we do this. Discovering somewhere new, even in a small way, is one of the best things we know how to chase — and it's turned into something we've tried to build a habit around as a family.

Which is where the birds come in.
Rather than put actual portraits of our family in the scene, we picked four characters to represent us instead — birds renowned for their traveling prowess. Not posed, not obvious — just tucked into the quiet corners of each print, perched on a sign or swooping through the sky, the way a person might actually be there if you happened to catch them mid-trip.

Four birds, one habit of wandering off course

Here's the part we didn't plan on: the four species we picked don't actually migrate together. In the real world, an Arctic Tern and a Barn Swallow aren't traveling companions — different routes, different seasons, different reasons for going. But in ours, they are. Somewhere along the way, this unlikely group decided that migrating alone wasn't nearly as good as migrating together, and they've been doing it their own way ever since — often drifting well outside their normal paths, purely because something looked interesting from the air and they wanted a closer look.

They're not the same. That's sort of the point. What holds them together isn't the destination — it's that none of them can turn down the pull of somewhere new.

The Arctic Tern  Never done for the day In real life, the Arctic Tern flies farther than any other creature on Earth — pole to pole, chasing an endless summer, seeing more daylight in a year than anything else alive. Ours is built the same way: always a few steps ahead, already looking at the next stop before anyone else has finished admiring this one. Not impatient, exactly — just constitutionally incapable of sitting still while there's light left in the day.

The Bar-tailed Godwit  Doesn't stop to eat The real Bar-tailed Godwit does something almost unbelievable: it flies from Alaska to the other side of the Pacific without landing once — no food, no rest, over a week in the air on fat reserves alone. Ours has that same one-track determination. Once it's decided where it's going, it's going, and it will good-naturedly ignore every "should we stop for a bit?" along the way. The others have learned not to argue. It's always worth it once you land.

The Barn Swallow Notices everything Barn Swallows build their nests close to people — barns, bridges, doorways — and they're quick, agile fliers, always cutting tight turns after something only they've spotted. Ours is the one who ducks down a side street the others would have walked past, who comes back with the best story about somewhere nobody else saw. Small, fast, and paying more attention than anyone gives it credit for.

The Common Crane Makes an entrance Cranes are famous for an elaborate dancing display — bowing, leaping, wings out, the whole performance — usually reserved for courtship. Ours does it for fun, for an audience, for no reason at all except that a new city deserves a little ceremony. Loud, a little dramatic, first to strike up a conversation with a stranger. The group's designated way of saying "we're here" out loud.

Where to find them

Once you know to look, it becomes a bit of a game. Chicago's print only features two of the four — the Arctic Tern and the Bar-tailed Godwit — because only two of us made that particular trip. Every city gets whichever combination of travelers actually went. No crowds, no strangers in the scene, just the landmark and whichever of the four happened to be there.

Selfishly, we'd love for these four to become more than a detail in a print series someday. Travel has been one of the best things we've done for our own kids, and there might be a longer story in these four yet.

For now, though: six cities, four birds, and a series we're not close to finished with.

See the full Stopover Series →