Hey all! Hello from Barcelona! True blogging will probably wait a bit until I have a more reliable (or at least comprehensible) means for doing so. Specifically, I have two tays worth of pictures ready to go in a web gallery, but the means to only put 1.4 Megs of photos up. Blar, blar, long story, paying for access by the minute.

Anyhow, on with the trip: The flights from Oakland to LAX to Munich to Barcelona went largely without hitches with the exception of Emily´s airporter never coming. They were 5 minutes late: She called and they said they'd be there in 15 minutes. They were 20 minutes late: She called and they said they wouldn´t make it at all. Panic and Taxi later everything was okay except for a stressed Emily.

Barcelona is beautiful. The pictures would speak louder than words, and they will, but they may wait until tomorrow, when we get on board the ship which has a reliable, albeit pricy, internet cafe.

So this is how I plan to blog on the trip: Virtually all the photos I take will go into web galleries and will be posted within a day or two of the stop. Later on (possibly much later on, as in after the trip) I'll go back and do nice things like culling, cropping, color adjusting, and all the stuff most of you could probably care less about.

What I will do is attempt to supply a narrative of some of the more interesting, or otherwise incomprehensable pictures, basically letting the pictures tell the story of the journey, like a little internet sitting on my shoulder.

So the cruise portion of the trip begins tomorrow, when we set sail for Nice, France. Along the way I'll relate the sights seen in Barcelona. Right now it's hot and humid here, but the sights are great, the people nice, and I'm enjoying one of the few places I can actually speak enough of the language to understand and be understood (weird internet cafe computer rules notwithstanding).

Well, I'm off to upload the first part of the first gallery, which will probably be mostly travel pictures. Please pay no mind to the broken links clicking through to the later pictures. They'll be up soon.

Hope all is well wherever you call home, and I'll write again soon.

PS: I´m keeping a record of 'interface abnormalities' I find along the way, like the 'pull-flush' toilet. You can take the geek away from his job, but you can't take the job out of the geek I guess.