After a long delay, I've finally up loaded Photos of our 2006 spring trip to France, Belgium, Germany and Austria. I've also included a link to my trip report.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slidesho...p;conn_speed=1

http://www.slowtrav.com/tr/tripreport.asp?tripid=1259

Hi Dana
Haven't read your trip report yet but love your pictures! They brought back such fond memories. Thanks, CJ

Lovely photographs. Thanks for sharing with us.

Wow, the photos were fabulous. My wife is shopping for a new digital camera, what brand/model did you use?

Thanks,
Whitey

Whitey,

It' a Pentax Optio, 6.0 megapixels w/3x zoom. I bought it at Costco last year. I don't remember the price, I think around $250. I bought a 1 gig memory card which still had room on it after I took about 550 pictures in Europe. The battery charger worked fine in Europe with just a plug adapter.

It's very small and came with a zipper pouch that attached to my belt.

Thanks Dana. It sounds like just the thing we need, I hate lugging around something too big.
I just read the trip report, it was great. Bravo on the planning - it takes me 8 months of planning for a two week vacation, I can't even imagine planning for a 7 week trip. We've been thinking of visiting the Strasbourg/Colmar area..how does it stack up against some of the other places you visited - Brugge, Rotenburg etc?

Whitey

Whitey,

Each has it's own special qualities. The area around Colmar is a big wine producing region and very beautiful. I can't say we had a favorite, but all of the cities had lots of tourist. I think if I had to pick one it would be Brugge. If you go to Rothenburg, the night watchmen tour is a must.

Hi Dana,

We were in Rothenburg the week after 9/11 (almost 6 years now), and we did the nightwatchman tour (the same guy as in your picture)- we thought it was great too. You've been to and liked alot of the places we've been - Rothenburg, Dinklesbuhl, Hallstatt, Brugge, Mont St Michel..so I was wondering how Colmar, Lyon and some of the other places rate against them.

Whitey

Whitey,

We just scratched the surface in Lyon, spending just one day in the city. You could easely spend a week there and the surrounding area. The Metro was very easy to use. When we travel we prefer rural areas over big cities. Colmar was nice, but the surrounding wine country, with it's small villages is what attracted us to the area. Colmar has a very nice old center with lots of timbered buildings and for us a day there was fine.

The area we really liked out of all the places we went was around Cahors in Southwest France. In fact it's one place we will return to on our next trip, staying again at the B&B in Albas.

OPPS

Your pictures are great! I am glad to know the info on your camera. Thanks for sharing!

ttt