Germany: At the airport...

The last week in Kassel, and then in Frankfurt, had frustrating Internet access in the hotels. Surfing was fine, fast even, but upload speeds were a joke. I was getting around 50 bytes/sec speeds. That's BYTES, not kilobytes! There was no point in trying to update the blog with images or image galleries. Kassel wasn't quite as bad but it seemed as though I ran out of time every night as far as updating the blog.

Anyway, the three weeks went by too quickly as usual. We drove about 4000km in the BMW turbo-diesel wagon. Average fuel consumption was around 7.2 l/100km. Considering that my Autobahn cruising speed was generally about 150-180 km/h, I'd say that is pretty impressive. One one leg of constant 160km/h it averaged around 6.8. I hit 220 in the BMW for a short stretch but didn't want the stress of driving that fast for too long.

I am all "schnitzeled out" too. An amazing variety of good food, good pastries and German beer means I definitely need to cut back after I return!

Visiting friends and relatives that I hadn't seen since 1984 was also very nice to do. I met three cousins that I had never seen before as they were all born after my last 1984 visit. I visited with old friend's of my mother's, who were the ones who gave me my first "real" camera back in 1978, a Kodak 110. I had a squirt-gun camera as a kid, but I guess that doesn't count!

My camera gear held up very well and my "experiment" to go on a major trip without all my big Canon gear was by and large a total success. I hardly missed the Canon, although the 17mm TS-E would definitely have been nice to have on more than a few occasions! I had considered taking my EOS-7D with only the 17mm TS-E but decided to keep the camera bag light after all.

I shot almost 4900 photos combined (although that also included about a thousand frames of time lapse) with my Panasonic GH2 and my Fuji X100, which amounted to just over 90 GB in total. No computer or hard drive problems... everything is securely backed up to 3 hard drives and one SSD.

I am definitely glad the Leica (Panasonic) 25mm f/1.4 arrived in time for my trip as I used it a lot and it proved to be an outstanding lens.

Anyway, more when I return and then more photos too! They are opening the gates for the boarding area and I've got to go...

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