Here's an example of a free 1GB SD card.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...amp;adid=17662

Free, after $30 rebate. Free shipping.

My two cents:

5 or 6 Megapixels is fine. The A630 is an excellent camera.

Chips: in a pinch you can buy more on the road, depending on where you are, but you'll pay through the nose in a drugstore or camera shop, especially in a tourist area. If it's a choice between $50 or $100 and no more pictures, you'll pay. I like the "many smaller chips" idea.

Remember however that if you come home with 2,500 pictures, you've got a TON of work ahead of you to go through them and do whatever you plan on doing with them (besides the ones you enlarge).

An aspect you haven't mentioned is composition; boring photos don't magically get better when they're 11x14 (I know, because I am the expert when it comes to taking boring photos). Take some care. Use your (optical only) zoom a lot to get different views. Don't use your "digital zoom" AT ALL if you want to blow up the results.

The other thing you want is batteries. I see the A630 takes AAs, which are everywhere. Unless you want to spend a zillion bucks on them, and chuck them in the landfill afterwards, get rechargeables, and bring your charger; you can charge a set in your room while you're out shooting. Always have a spare set on you; zooming and flash take a lot of juice.

I strongly second the suggestion to get familiar with the camera before you go, so you spend as little time as possible futzing with the controls. The preset modes are pretty good for most uses; and the nice thing about digital is you can instantly see if your shot is crummy, and take it again.

<b>AND LEARN TO TAKE PICTURES WITHOUT THE FLASH</b> - except outdoors as fill-in on a sunny day.

Oh, yeah. Flash looks terrible most of the time, unless your subject is precisely the right distance away, and more importantly annoys all the people around you even more than your cell phone blaring out &quot;Camptown Ladies&quot; at top volume. And damages the museum artwork. If you want to take pictures inside, set your ISO as high as it goes and brace it tightly against something. They make little tripods that are barely bigger than a fat pen let you take steady shots. You'll get a little blur but you won't get that washed out bugeyed look. This camera will have an easy way to turn the flash off. Find it.

Just one thought that I heard once before...
Borrow some flash cards from friends for your vacation and be willing to lend them your cards for their vacation. (This only works when you are on different vacation schedules.)
But as others have mentioned; memory cards are not very expensive anymore.