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What an awesome way to end our trip to Europe! Amsterdam has it all. We started the day early with a trip to the floating tulip market, a tour of the cities lovely canal system and a quick tour of a diamond factory. Then it was back to the ship for lunch. It just happens that our trip coincided with the short tulip growing season, so we spent the afternoon at the unbelievable eye-poping Keukenhof. I have never seen a more beautiful garden. The colors were so bright that they hurt my eyes. A trip to a flower garden would not normally appeal to me, but this place was truly amazing. Well worth the trip!

Our timimg was perfect in another way as well. It turns out that April 30th is the day of Amsterdam’s biggest party - Queen’s Day. More than one million wild party-goers flooded the city of 750,000. The streets were jam-packed - live music was being performed everywhere, and spirits were very high. ;-)

So, without a doubt the most fun was the Queen’s Night celebration in the Red Light District where I saw some of the loveliest sights on the entire trip. (Ahem) Unfortunatley, cameras are not allowed, so I can not share them with you here. I recommend you go and see for yourself as soon as possible!

Kelly and I finished our last night of our trip with a slow stroll through the magnificent Amsterdam Central Train Station before heading back to the River Queen for the last time.

More pictures from Amsterdam.

I made this panorama of the riverfront from the deck of our ship in Dusseldorf without a tripod, and the stitching of the 8 images did not go too well, but you get the idea.

I also made two time-lapse videos of the trip from Koln to Dusseldorf, and they turned out pretty cool, but the files are too large. I’m looking for a way to produce acceptable compressed results.

It was also in Dusseldorf that we ate the best lunch of the trip. I had lamb fillet in green peppercorn sauce, which was every bit as good as the lamb served at my favorite Bay Area restaurant - Soizic. They prepared salmon in the same sauce, and it too was delicious. It was also here that we first tasted spargel - the white asparagus cherished by Germans. Yum!

Today was the first day we saw the sun since arriving in Europe. And what a lovely day it was! Before today, I was worried that I might not get any photos on this trip to rival those of from our Thailand trip. It turns out though, that Germany is home to some pretty fabulous castles. The coffee’s not bad either. Or the currywurst. Or the ice cream.

(I am really surprised at just how dificult it is to get connected to the Internet from Germany. Unlike Thailand, which seemed to have an Internet cafe every 100 feet, they are a few and far between here. We have a computer on the ship, but it has an e-mail only connection, so it is not possible for me to make a blog entry. After three unsuccessful attempts to get on line in K

Despite mostly gloomy weather, we are having a wonderful time. The pace is fast and furious. Today we toured the castle in the beautiful city of Heidelberg and saw a barrel with a capactity of 58,000 gallons of white wine. Unfortunately, the barrel is empty these days. From there, we sailed to Rudesheim and took a quick tour of Siegfried’s Mechanical Museum and it’s huge collection of bizarre musical machines.

After a bit of wine tasting at the nearest weinstube, we tried our first Rudesheim Kaffe. The drink consists of Asbach brandy, sugar and coffee topped with a large scoop of whipped cream and yummy chocolate bits. Delicious!

Finally, we dined on pork and sauerkraut at the Rudesheim Schloss. The food was fantastic! The only odd thing was that the restaurant’s excellent wait staff and band catered way too much to Americans. To begin with, there were American - not German - flags on each table. That seems a bit odd to me. Then the band played music suited only to an American audience. Sure, they threw in the occasional Beer Barrel Polka, but went way-y-y too far to make us feel like we were anywhere but in a restaurant in Rudesheim, Germany. They played such well-known German folk tunes as John Denver’s Country Roads, The Yellow Rose of Texas and even I Did it My Way. Things got really wierd though, when they perfomed the dreaded chicken dance to the delight of the half-drunk American crowd. This was about all I could take, so we strolled slowly through the invigorating evening mist back to our ship for an after dinner cocktail. We’d need our strength - tomorrow will be another busy day…

More photos…

Quite literally.

Today while enjoying an espresso in the shadow of the magnificent 466 foot tall Strasbourg Cathedral, I reached for my wallet and accidentally knocked it off the table. I watched in stunned disbelief as the thin wallet swished silently through an equally thin crack in a sewer grate underneath our table. The wallet landed in a pile of garbage 12 feet beneath the street. And there it stayed. I could see it, but there was absolutely no way to retrieve it or the credit cards, drivers license and cash within it. Dammit Jim!

I’m proud of the fact that I have never lost a wallet in my life. Happily, I can still make this claim, as I know exactly where my wallet and all its contents are - underneath the street in front of cafe Il Pinocchio near the Strasbourg Cathedral. (You can see my in-laws pointing at the very spot in a picture below.)

The rest of the morning was spent touring around Strasbourg. The Strasbourg Scooter Club were out in full force striking fear in the hearts of men, women and children. later, Kelly spotted a carousel in the heart of the city and could not resist a ride on a painted pony.

We spent a short time in Speyer, Germany that evening and took a walking tour in the rain.

Finally, we returned to the ship for another excellent meal and a short night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’ll visit Heidelberg first thing in the morning.

If you’re interested, there are many more pictures from day two of our trip here.

Today we began a 9 day cruise along the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, north through France, Germany and ending in Amsterdam. Our spotlerss ship is the beautiful, six-year-old River Queen, operated by Uniworld. Our room is very nice - luxurious, in fact. There are 125 passengers and 37 crew on board. The 100% american 100%white passengers average somewhat more than 60 years in age, but there are several younger people (like us! :) and even one nine year old girl traveling with her Dad and Grandparents. Service on board the ship is outstanding, the food is great, and our itinereray is jam-packed. The only thing that is lacking is access to the Internet. There is a laptop computer on board with which passengers may send e-mail, but “normal” access to the Internet is not possible, making blogging a challenge. To make this entry, I had to locate an Internet cafe in Heidelberg on the third day of our cruise.

After a quick tour of the charming town of Basel, we sailed for Strasbourg under cloudy skies.

View more pictures from day one of our trip here.

My newest Nikon digital camera is a work of art. It feels solid, shoots smooth and fast, and the images are the best I have ever seen from any digital camera. However, to really appreciate them, you’ll have to use your imagination a bit. You see - the 12.4 megapixel images are 4288 x 2848 pixels in size. This makes them too large for viewing on any existing computer monitor, and way too large for posting on my blog. But it’s there sheer size that makes them so amazing. I’m sure these images would stand up to enlarging up to 16 x 20 inches or more. This is one case where size matters. I am anxious to print some of the images I’ll make with this camera at Pictopia.

That’s not the only thing to love about this fine camera though. Colors are excellent, flesh tones are very natural looking. Exposures seem perfect - even with the SB-800 flash. Images seem to have much better dynamic range than the D70. The images look less “digital” than any other digital images I’ve seen.

Camera vibration is minimal. The huge LCD is has many useful settings. The shutter is fast and makes a wonderful sound. (I’m not sure, but I think I prefer the sound of the Canon 20D.)

I’m surprised to say that post-processing times may actually decrease compared to the Nikon D70. The quality of the fine JPEG’s from this camera is so high that I may not need to use RAW much at all. With the D70, I shot almost everything in RAW, which adds considerably to the time it takes to prepare images. The new Nikon’s auto white-balance seems to work so well that one of the main attractions of RAW files - the ability to color-correct them after the fact - may not be needed. And the added resolution more than makes up for the other advantage of D70 RAW files.

If you have a broadband connection, and would like to see more of what this camera can do - along with the Sigma 80-400 zoom lens I bought to go with it - there are some large sample images here.

Stay tuned for many more images. The camera and lens came just in time for our trip to Europe. Woo-hoo!

I’ll need lots of storage for my new Nikon D2X and it’s 12.4 megapixel images. For large storage, Microdives are cheaper than solid state CF cards and nearly as fast. The new Hitachi Microdrives are very reasonably priced!

UPDATE: They’re even cheaper here.

I don’t often photograph children, but I found four year old Gabby to be simply irresistable.

I posted these at a somewhat higher resolution than I normally do. I am anxious to compare these D70 images with those from The D2X. :-)

We all know this - and it’s absolutely true. Hardware has almost nothing to do with the quality of your work. I’m convinced that results don’t even have much to do with skill. What it’s about is motivation.

I mean, what if I had shot the images in the collages I hung in our hallway tonight with a more expensive camera? Would the end result be dramatically better? I doubt it. Is there anything special about the techniques I used to produce these images. No. Anyone with a modest PC and a $300 digital camera could have done this. What makes this special is that I actually did it. It took some time - maybe 15 hours worth of fiddling with the thousand or so images I shot in Thailand - but these simple collages could have been assembled by anyone who was simply motivated to do it.

So, here’s my challenge to you. Get out there - take a couple zillion pictures. Use your imagination! Do something unique - or not. Print it large. Print it small, sideways, out-of-focus, with false color - whatever - just do it! You’ll be glad you did. Share your results with the rest of us. Display it proudly on your wall. Your friends will swear you have real talent! Really!

And then I’ll tell you why I need to have a new Nikon D2X. :-)

What kind of dog are you?