This past few months were a little bit of an emotional roller coaster, but after I got into law school, I knew I had to cure my travel bug before classes started. After many hours trying to find a good way to use my airline points, I ended decided a round-trip ticket to and from London would be easiest—and then I could figure things out from there.
As it quickly became clear, it's an eventful time to travel as an American. And as much as I tried to escape the news cycle back home, the farther I ventured into Europe, the harder it became to forget about the backdrop of 2025.
I ended up hitting nine countries—twelve flights and (surprisingly) just three long-distance trains—and taking just around 10,000 photos. Here are the best of the lot, along with commentary about architecture, infrastructure, our collective project of democracy, and everything in between.
Click the photos to view them full-screen. And let me know what you think!
—Daniel
1: London
I visited London for the first time earlier this year, and I instantly fell in love, but the summer is when the city really comes alive.
Even during my first visit, I was most impressed by the city's architecture. The city is, in Jane Jacobs' vocabulary, built to human scale—in other words, the built environment feels proportional to you. In New York City, skyscrapers tower over you; in London, you have agency over the buildings.
Yet London manages to do that while feeling fresh, modern, and new: there's no shortage of glass buildings in Central London or in Canary Wharf, and soaring station canopies give the Jubilee and Elizabeth Lines a great feeling of scale.
So in some ways, London's greatest achievement is that it manages to seamlessly generations of architecture into one coherent story. Almost as if Victorian streets, brutalist blocks of architecture, and glass-facade skyscrapers were conceived, from the very beginning, to go together.
2: Valencia
One thing that defines how I travel is this: I hate the crowds. Especially with the tourist protests this summer, that meant Barcelona was off-limits—so when I realized a friend was in Valencia for the summer, I decided it would be a perfect pit stop.
I'd highly recommend Valencia for a taste of Southern Spain. Great food (horchata made with tiger nuts, paella with rabbit and snail), great beaches, great festivals—it's really got it all.
A big reason I came to Valencia, though, was (again!) for the architecture. If you've ever traveled through downtown Manhattan, the buildings below might look familiar to you. That's because they were designed by Santiago Calatrava, the same architect behind the World Trade Center Oculus.
Calatrava is a familiar name among architecture and infrastructure nerds like me, and it turns out he designed a series of buildings for his hometown—a science museum, a concert hall, an indoor garden, and several more.
3: Bologna
From Valencia, I flew to Bologna, where I rode on perhaps on the sketchiest airport monorail I've ever been on. (It made Newark's AirTrain look like the pinnacle of modernity.)
We only spent a weekend in Bologna, which was just enough to try some really, really good pasta. (It was so good, in fact, that I didn't take any photos of the pasta.)
Interlude: Zurich Airport
It wouldn't be a proper trip recap without some airport content. Zurich is one of my favorite airports, second perhaps only to Copenhagen. That's because it shows that a good airport doesn't have to be extravagant—thoughtful architecture, spacious seating, and good views of planes are all you need.
4: Madeira
Madeira is, by far, one of the most impressive places I've been. It's hard to believe that a single island has so many different landscapes: magical sunrises above the clouds, mystical forests in the fog, towering waterfalls tucked away in the woods, and ton more.
I'll let the photos speak for themselves.
Now, of course, what stuck out to me was just how much of the island is shaped by infrastructure.
Centuries-old irrigation paths and tunnels now form popular hiking trails, known as levadas. Madeira's airport is one of the world's dangerous, even after the island extended the airport into the ocean on 180 vertical columns—pilots need special training to land there.
And hundreds of bridges and tunnels criss-cross the island's mountainous terrain—many of the tunnels built with support from the European Union, using funding intended to help develop the EU's outermost regions and territories.
It turns out that wouldn't be the last time I came to see the EU in action this trip.
5: Croatia
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