I know everyone thought I was stalling, or taking too long to show pictures, but I really have a good reason. We had 6,172 photos from our trip. Yep, that’s right, SIX THOUSAND+ pictures to go through. You didn’t really want to see all of those, did you? So after a lot of work, I have chosen 750 photos, geotagged them, cleaned em up in Picasa, and uploaded them to the web. I had planned to upload them to Flickr, but their website is causing me problems. So, I found a new website for displaying photos that I think is even better, and I couldn’t be happier to display my photos on SmugMug. Check out the website, it is a great place to keep all your digital photos.
Here is the link to our Europe trip photos: www.skaustin.smugmug.com
If there are photos you like, please give them the thumbs up. Just put your mouse over the photo to see the thumbs up/down voting.
Stuff I do not want to forget about in twenty years:
- The swiss franc was about equal to the dollar so it was easy to calculate how much things were really costing me (hint: a lot). The euro was very high to the dollar, so I would add 60% to every price to get my true cost. Converted from both francs and euros, $60 seemed to be the usual total for meals, both lunch and dinner.
- Italian showers are all little. Even if the rest of the bathroom is spacious there will be a tiny little shower in the corner, always a pre-fab unit. My personal theory why it is so small is because Europeans use the bidet frequently so they don’t care about a large shower.
- Favorite parts of Italy: driving to Volterra, Pigelleto Nature Reserve, the hilltown of Cetona as seen from a distance (did not stop there), the belvedere Etruscan park with the caves near Cetona, the waving wheat fields in Val D’Orcia, the villas along the shores of Lake Como.
- Favorite parts of Switzerland: All of it I’ve seen. Driving to Lauterbrunnen, the mountains around Lake Brienz, the giant mountains along the austostrada heading to Belinzona.
- Kevin and I were checking out a cave in the bronze-age Etruscan dwellings near Cetona when Kevin realized there were bats in there with us. One was flying around us to check us out.
- Kevin and I carried matching Eagle Creek bags. Mine had a pink tag, Kevin’s had a blue tag.
- There is no fresh-brewed ice tea available. Some places have Lipton in a can. When I ordered Coke Light (Diet Coke) and Kevin ordered regular coke, the restaurant would always put a lemon slice in Kev’s coke to differentiate it from mine.
Everybody is asking about pictures. Since Kevin and I took separate cameras and we both love to take pictures, we have several thousand pics from our trip (over 10 gigs worth!). Some are great, some are duplicates, and some are boring, so we are going through all of them to cull down the collection to a manageable set. Even for an 18 day trip, you probably don’t want to see more than 200, right? Even that may be too many. I’m working on it for a few hours every night, so hopefully we will have them available for viewing soon.
Remember that I talked about taking our GPS? Because of my GPS data logger I have timestamped location information that I can match up with my pictures. That means you will be able to view my pictures on a map and see just where each picture was taken. If you have never seen this before, click here for an example.
After 21+ hours of travel, we made it home. We left our Rome hotel at 6:30am (11:30pm Austin time) to catch the subway/train/plane, and arrived home in Austin at 9:00pm (4:00am Rome time). Getting to the plane in Rome was stressful, but after takeoff we were able to relax.
The best part of being home is spending time with Katie, our cat. She was very upset with us for being gone for so long, and let us know it. Her little voice sounds hoarse from howling for us, and she hissed at me (something she has never done before) when she first saw me. But she is recovering, and clings to me like duct tape. She’ll be fine, but Kevin thinks we shouldn’t be gone for so long in the future because it was so stressful for her.
Much thanks to Nathan, Chris, and Elvia who all helped to watch our house, take care of Katie, gather our mail, and mow our lawn while we were away. You guys rock! Without you there we would have worried the whole time and probably couldn’t have been gone so long.