Old Town Square, Prague

In just a few days’ time, I will be publishing my annual survey The Top Ten D&O Stories of the year. For now, though, we are all celebrating the holidays, and no one really wants to be reading about case law developments or insurance coverage issues. So instead, I thought I would do a post featuring my favorite travel pictures from 2025. I freely concede that this is totally self-indulgent, allowing me to bask in the delight of some of my favorite travel experiences. But just to show that this isn’t just about me, below I invite readers to send in their favorite 2025 travel pictures, which I will publish on this site over the coming weeks. Please see the instructions below on how to submit your travel pictures.

I thought I would start the collection with one of my great travel experiences during the year, my visit to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, in October.

Jalan Alor is Kuala Lumpur’s famous open-air food street, known for its vibrant atmosphere, red lanterns, and diverse array of Malaysian, Chinese, and Thai street foods. It was absolutely fabulous.

As part of the October trip to Asia, I also made a first-time-ever visit to Bangkok. It was a great trip and I honestly had a hard time choosing my favorite picture. In the end, I decided I had to include a picture of my visit to Bangkok’s canals.

The Bangkok particular tour boat I took explored the Klorng Bangkok Yai, along which are a number of important cultural and historic sites. The overall experience of the canal boat tour is the feeling that you are traveling deep into the heart of old Bangkok, affording a glimpse of the city from an earlier time.

Thinking about the Bangkok canals also made me think about my September visit to Amsterdam. I was fortunate to visit during a stretch of warm, sunny, Fall days. The city’s canal district was just beautiful, which I enjoyed exploring and re-discovering.

Amsterdam’s famous canals were built in the 17th century, during the Dutch Golden Age. Collectively, the canals are a masterpiece of urban planning, architecture, and engineering. The central canal district is composed of a series of concentric semi-circular canals, today mostly still lined by the characteristic homes with their narrow three-and-four story façades, ornate masonry, large windows, and gabled roofs.

My travels this year included not only first-time-visits to places that were new to me, but also return trips to familiar places. Among other things, I travelled three times in 2025 to London, one of my favorite places to visit.

I love visiting new places, but a big part of the pleasure for me in visiting London is returning to familiar places. During my September trip to Europe (which included the stop in Amsterdam), I was fortunate to have time for a walk through St. James’s Park, and to enjoy this view of Buckingham Palace in the early fall sunshine.

My September travels also took me to Australia, which I have visited before — but this time I worked in a first-time-ever visit to Queensland. I took so many great pictures during this trip — Australia is so beautiful — that it was hard to choose.

I took this picture during a guided kayak tour to see sea turtles. It is a picture of a mangrove tree near an island just off the coast of Palm Cove, Queensland. It was just such a beautiful day. We had great weather throughout the trip, even though it was still late Southern Hemisphere winter there.

In June, I was in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, rightly celebrated for its beautiful architecture, cobble-stone streets, rich history and iconic sites.

An evening view of Prague’s Old Town Square, with its rich mix of Gothic, baroque, and Renaissance architecture. The guide books correctly say of the Square that it is “especially beautiful when illuminated at night.”

As part of the same European trip that included the visit to Prague, we also stopped for a weekend in Lucerne, the gateway to the Swiss Alps and a timeless city combining history, charm, and natural beauty.

A view of the Alpine meadows and of the Lake. Note the tallest peaks still covered with snow even in June. The best part is that we started this walk right in central Lucerne, and traveling only on foot we very quickly were in this spectacularly beautiful countryside.

Berlin is an interesting city, I stopped there briefly during a May trip to Germany. I spent almost the duration of the visit in the former East Berlin, which was absolutely fascinating.

This is a view from the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in the Tiergarten, the huge park in Berlin’s city center. The view depicted here is toward the east. You can just see the Reichtstag Building on the far left and just to the right of that the tall Fernsehturm (TV tower) in Alexanderplatz. To the right of the tower, you can just see the blue dome of the Berlin Cathedral. You can’t quite see it in this picture but at the far end of the radial boulevard is the Brandenberg Gate. For me, at least, what is most interesting about this pictures is that just about all of buildings you can see — other than the Reichstag building — are located in the former East Berlin.

During my trip to Germany, I also took a weekend for a first-time-ever visit to Istanbul, the historic city where Europe meets Asia. What an absolutely fabulous place. My Istanbul visit was another trip where I took so many great pictures, it is hard to choose.

Even though I have so many sunlit pictures of Istanbul, I decided to feature this evening picture instead. This is the famous Sultan Ahmed Mosque, familiarly known as the Blue Mosque. The iconic mosque, with its six minarets and its famous blue tiles (for which the mosque is known), was built in the early 17th century by Sultan Ahmed I. The cool thing about this picture for me is that I took the photo from my hotel room window.

I was in Paris briefly in March, for a business meeting. However, one of my main objectives while in Paris was to see the results from the completed renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris, following the April 2019 fire. The church reopened in December 2024. after nearly five years of restoration. The results are impressive.

As a result of the post-fire restoration, the church’s interior is bright and clean. The cleaning process brought out the beauty of the sand-colored stone, which provides quite a contrast to the darker pre-fire appearance. The overall effect — especially for anyone familiar with the church’s pre-fire dark appearance — is absolutely stunning.

Although it is great to travel in the warmer months, sometimes it is necessary to travel in the colder months, too. Along those lines, I had a January trip to Dublin, which could have been quite chilly. However, as it turned out, we enjoyed unexpected sunshine and mild temperatures.

Though still in its winter dormancy, St. Stephen’s Green was a peaceful and pleasant place in the late January afternoon sunshine.

As part of the same trip, we also travelled for a first-time-ever trip to Brussels, where we also enjoyed some unexpected sunshine.

This is the city’s opulent central square, the Grand-Place (or Grote Markt, as it is known in Dutch), facing the flamboyant Town Hall. The city’s central square absolutely shone in the sunshine.

From my perspective, no collection of my 2025 travel pictures would be complete without a picture of my Michigan home-away-from-home, in Pentwater, Michigan.

The Lake Michigan beach at Pentwater, Michigan on November 3, 2025, just before the curtain finally came down for the season.

On a final, sad note, I wanted to include this picture from our September trip to Australia, of Bondi Beach. It is such a beautiful place, it is so sad that it is now associated with such a tragic event. I share this picture in memorium of the people who lost their lives there in the December terrorist attack.

So those are my favorite travel pictures of 2025. What about yours? Please send me your favorite travel pictures, with a short description of where the picture was taken and the circumstances surrounding the photo. When I have collected enough pictures, I will publish them in a separate blog post. Please send your pictures to kevin.lacroix@rtspecialty.com.

There’s one more thing. I am always looking for new travel ideas. If you have any thoughts about places I might want to visit (especially if it is a place I might overlook) please send along your thoughts in an email to the address listed above.

More Pictures, Just for Fun

In the rose garden, in Vondelpark, in Amsterdam
A grey heron in St. James’s Park, London

An Eastern Water Dragon in Sydney Harbor National Park, Australia
An Oystercatcher in a mangrove swamp on an island near Palm Cove, Queensland.
A wall lizard in Meggenhorn, near Lucerne, Switzerland
A wild rose, near Lucerne
In the botanical garden in Prague
One of the quieter year-round residents of Berlin