Odd spots, strange trips and panda poop: Daily Detour turns 1

It’s Daily Detour’s birthday and we’re celebrating with a picture of, um, panda poop.

Well, why not? Since its launch March 7, 2013, the Daily Detour photo gallery has set its sights on “odd spots, strange trips and great moments in travel.” In a word, detourism.

The idea is to surprise you a little, perhaps with raincoat-clad travelers awaiting dawn on Mt. Haleakala, or a white-coated waiter awaiting customers at the Tadich Grill in San Francisco. Maybe with a shot of Ken Burns grabbing snaps in Wyoming; or a Tijuana tout helping his “zebra” smile.

So the panda byproduct here, displayed by an upbeat keeper at the San Diego Zoo, isn’t such a departure. (As you probably guessed, it’s mostly bamboo.)

Like the keepers with their pandas, I feed the gallery every working day, with a picture and caption from the road — some shot last week, some last century. (I’ve been writing for The Times, mostly the Travel section, since 1990.) In its first 364 days, the gallery drew about 591,000 page views.

It also birthed two offspring. One is “The Detourist’s List: Buildings that make you smile,” which celebrates memorable design, from the earthen remains of the Iranian citadel of Bam to the neon splendor of the Alibi tiki bar in Portland.

Another is “The Detourist’s List: Weird signs, shirts, walls and words around the world.”

Like “Daily Detour,” the design and signage blogs are drawn from my travels. They grow every few months. Now and again I nip and tuck to keep the photo totals under 100. After all, at some point, we do have to get back to work.