Our Story Begins...

Six friend went on a trip and only one lived to tell the tail...oops! Wrong story! [Note to self: stop sniffing the glue]

This is the story of six friends who journeyed to Far Away Lands(tm) in search of a vacation. What they got was a fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping, heart-stopping, bone-crushing, funny-car-smashing, nitro-burning, ... umm, err... Sorry! That's the Tractor Pull at the 'Dome next Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! [Note to self: stop eating the mushrooms]

Where was I? Oh Ya! Six people, Far Away Lands... got it!

Right, so, six of us went on this trip. Four of us flew out together from San Francisco Airport, the International Terminal, while the other two flew out from the San Diego Airport. The flight was a grueling 12 hours (non-stop). We landed at the Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. Took a cab (Ack! what crazy drivers the French are!) and met at the hotel (the first of four hotels we would stay at during out trip). We'd hoof it or take the Metro around Paris. Then we took a sleeper train to Munich, Germany. Again, we'd hoof it or take the Metro around Munich. Then we took a day train to Amsterdam, where (you guessed it!) we hoofed it or took the Metro around Amsterdam. Then we took a day train back to Paris, where we stayed for one night. The last leg of our 10 day tour was to fly out of Charles De Gaulle back to California (again, two different flights).

A note about the pictures...

All pictures were taken with a Nikon CoolPix 900 digital camera. All pictures are 1280x960, 24-bit color JPEGs. Most images are 550k in size, though many are smaller. I've embedded thumbnail versions of the pictures (1/4 the original size) so that you can get an idea as to what the image is without actually downloading the whole thing first. Clicking on the thumbnail will bring up the full size version.

For some reason just about all of the pictures came out too dark and sometimes fuzzy. Actually, this time of year is pretty dark, so there wasn't much I could do about it in the first place. I've made an attempt to lighten them using Gimp, but in some cases the images are so washed out that the images are just about worthless. Sorry, I did the best I could. I have the original, un-retouched, images if anyone wants to try their hand at it.

The Motley Crew

Here's a picture of our group, assembled in the lobby of our first (of many) hotels, the Plaza Etoile. Various people in our group earned a title during the trip (for various reasons):

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Top row, left to right, we have Jay and Fred (Curious Fred).
Bottom row, left to right, we have the Peter (The Fruit-Tart), Carrie (The Metro Queen), Linda (The Queen of the Erotic Museums) and Terry.

These titles were acquired over the length of the trip. Some titles you just don't want to know how they were given...

The trip is broken into 5 pages:
Paris (France), Munchen (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), (back to) Paris (France) and Advertisements across Europe

And that's it. Really you need to have someone from our group providing commentary for the pictures, as we were all present for just about all of them.