Sometimes you need to step out for a second, to take yourself out of the here and now and go somewhere else. With everything so waves hands in all directions right now, here are three places I'm going, if only for a moment.

Skating Across America

Earlier this summer, pro skater Demarcus James embarked on a journey from Oakland to New York on his skateboard. It's been incredible watching him kick-push-coast his way up the Sierra Nevada mountains and down into the desert of Nevada. Averaging around 40 miles a day, it's slow, hot, and more than a little dangerous. But the daily videos he puts together and posts to Instagram are truly inspiring and beautiful and showcase the things that are still pretty incredible about this country as seen from atop a board. (He's raising money on Gofundme for his travels, toss a couple bucks his way if you can.)

Bezawada Arts

I follow a huge number of signpainters on Instagram, but Bezawada Arts is unique. An auto shop based in India, who post regularly to Instagram, they paint trucks and busses with some of the steadiest hands I've ever seen. South Asian truck art is worth a whole post of its own sometime, but watching these masters of the craft freestyle perfect gothic lettering on the bumper of a truck is some of the most relaxing moments I get in a day.

Cornell Feederwatch

I've been watching birdfeeder cams since the pandemic, and the one I've come back to the most is the one at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. A lot of the time it's just bird feeders swinging in a gentile breeze, sometimes it's more of an ASMR thing with the far-away sounds of bird calls, and other times, yes, it's buzzing with activity as birds swarm the feeders. Either way, it's worth a visit to YouTube just to be taken away from everything for a while.