Recently, Ruth and I had the great fortune of having a week off to travel with about 3 weeks to plan it.
Although it may appear that we are traveling every other week, we typically only take one or two long (long = 1-2 weeks) vacations each year. Just living that Silicon Valley PTO life. The majority of our travel consists of taking advantage of long weekends or piggybacking one of my work trips when we can.
What would you do with one week? We scheme about this question all the time! We floated a few ideas: New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii (all solid options obviously). But, as always, we wanted to make sure we were getting the best bang for our buck. We are also planning a trip to Ireland, Scotland and England in November, so we wanted to try something other than Europe.
We decided that a long flight to the Southern Hemisphere wouldn’t be worth the few days we we’d get on the ground, so we decided to do something a bit closer.
We finally landed on spending a week in New England.
Neither of us had spent a ton of time there other than a week I spent in Boston with some friends right after college. New England in fall: there were so many options of what to do! But we needed to narrow it down.
We had one week. In order to get the full experience of all the Northeast has to offer, we decided on two nights in Vermont, two nights on the north shore of New England and three nights in Boston.
This turned out to be the PERFECT itinerary and just might have been our best planning to date. I really encourage you to do a version of this trip once in your life.
The only thing we would change about the trip is the week we went (although in this case our dates were inflexible). We flew out the last week of September, and fall had decided to come VERY late this year (but yeah, global warming is still fake, right?). While the leaves had definitely starting changing from green to gold and orange, the fall foliage wasn’t as vibrant and dramatic as it would be in mid to late October.
Oh, and it was hot, like, really hot in Vermont. Good thing all we packed were sweaters and vests. Ruth made us do a “mandatory Target run” for some warm weather items halfway through the trip.
Minor weather complaints aside, the trip was incredible. In our next few posts, we’ll talk about our time in Vermont, on the coast, and in Boston.
We had a week to experience a ton in New England, and we wanted to make sure we could capture it all.
We are still on our journey to find the perfect camera to purchase, so we turned to the team at LensProToGo to rent some new gear. On our trip to Europe this summer, we had rented the Sony Alpha A7S II. (You can also read more about Paris here and Amsterdam here).
The Sony Alpha A7S II was amazing but a little out of our price range to buy. I loved it so much that I thought it’s less expensive cousin, the A7 II, would be a great fit for our New England trip.
The benefit of renting through LensProToGo is being able to test out the camera and lenses to see what you really like. It also gives you a chance to practice your photography skills which is very much a priority of ours.
The A7 II is about 60% of the cost of the A7S II while offering double the sensor resolution (24MP vs 12MP). It also is very comparable in photography and possibly even slightly better in my experience. Of course, the A7S II has better low-light and video capability, but at this point in our blogging journey the value of the A7 outweighs the extra features of the A7S.
We also rented two lenses from LensProToGo, one which we rented previously and loved– the Zeiss 25mm f/2.0– and a new lens– the Zeiss 55mm f/1.8. This trip really confirmed it for me: the Zeiss 25 is an amazing travel lens. We used it the majority of the time in Europe and hardly took it off the camera in New England. It’s definitely an expensive lens (about $1,300) but incredibly versatile and shoots super sharp. The Zeiss 55 was a solid lens as well, but it was more challenging for me to utilize it.
This gear was so perfect for our trip in New England. From apple picking in Vermont to sunsets on the Atlantic coastline to the brick streets in Boston, we were amazed at the quality of shots we were able to get. It’s been so fun to figure this whole photography thing out while traveling to amazing places.
All that being said, it looks like my annual work bonus will probably go towards purchasing the Sony Alpha A7 II and the Zeiss 25mm f/2.0 lens. Without LensProToGo, we would have probably made a dumb camera purchase with a bad lens and taken a while to figure out how to use them. But instead, I feel really confident in this gear and excited to use LensProToGo in the future to test other secondary lenses.
LensProToGo has kindly offered our readers a 10% discount on any rental order! Just use the code ROME10 to access the discount. You’ll be treated like royalty through the whole process and they are happy to assist with any photography questions you have.
