When my friend Carole May started her new gig as the Puget Sound Marine Life Examiner, I realized that the Internet can provide us with opportunities to staycation.  Even if you are lucky enough to live in the Puget Sound region, a whale watching trip can be very expensive.  And, many of us can’t afford the kind of digital cameras that will capture those magnificent photos of orcas breaching.

But, we can all see Carole’s photos on her Whales and Sails web site, and we can all travel with her and learn about marine life at the Examiner.  I was fascinated, for example, about how all the orcas have a name and how marine naturalists are able to identify them.

On Sunday, The New York Times Magazine‘s cover story was “Watching Whales Watching Us” by Charles Siebert.  The art illustrating the story is fabulous.  If you go to the NYT web site to read the story, please take the time to click on the illustrations to enlarge them if you aren’t able to actually see the magazine.  This one is my favorite:

Illustration by Ivan Chermayeff

Two more of my favorite staycation web sites are Barbados Free Press and their link to the Barbados Photo Blog as well as Alaska’s Well Seasoned Woman.

What’s your favorite staycation or artist’s date?