Finally, I'm an adult... I have my own Costco card.

Solely out of a sense of obligation, I ought to recap the last final days of my great European adventure. And here it is. I spent the rest of the time in Vienna, seeing sights, and then I went hiking in Kitzbühel, Austria. The night before I flew home I found myself in Munich, where I took some fun night shots of the town and watched the Champions League Final. I hate AC Milan, by the way. Fitingly, the last place I found myself before coming home was Odeon's Platz in Munich, which happens to be my favorite part of Munich, which city happens to be my favorite in Europe, and which also happens to be full of lots of sentiment, as it was the locaton of my first street-preach, nearly five years previously. Yes, it made a nice bookend for my whole trip.
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But, I'm home now and ready to get on with the rest of my life. In other words, I got my own Costco card and I'm finally an adult. Life isn't quite the busy and stressful time that I expected it to be-- I'm living at home and I spend much of my time with some of my best friends... the Anchors of ESPN's Sportscenter. I have packets to do, but they're not too strenuous, and I've been looking for a job, but I'm incredibly picky about what job I want, and I haven't been successful in finding one. Sad... Utah has an unemployment rate of 3-4%, and I can't find what I want. Economists usually attribute that percentage group as the people in between jobs anyway, so I must be the only non-employed indiviual with absolutely no job prospects in the State of Utah. Okay, that's a exaggeration, but it's still sad.

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But don't you think for one moment that I haven't kept myself busy. I'm sometimes the best at finding something useless to keep myself efficient. Wait, "efficient" is another exaggeration. We'll just stick with "busy". It's called Google Earth, and for all of you geeks/stalkers who use this often, you'll really like this.

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During my trip I took over 2100 photos. Of those, I picked my favorite 333, then added in all of my other favorite photos of either myself or of things I've taken. It came to a total of over 500 pics. Then, using the Google Earth software and the Panoramio web site, I created an "overlay" that shows all the actual photos at the places where they were taken. So, here's how it works. Do it if you have no time on your hands, and if you have an unusual interest in my vacation. But I assure everyone that it wouldn't be a complete waste of your time.

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Download Google Earth if you haven't already. Once you've got it running and you've aquainted yourself with the controls enough, download the overlay. Downloading is quick, it sometimes takes a while for the pictures to load, though. But no matter. Once you have the overlay down and enabled (it usualy is enabled automatically), you'll then be able to see a small thumbnail over the spots where the photo was taken.

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For example. Once you have the program and the overlay running, type in "Piazza San Pietro Vatican", and this is what you'll see:
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See the thumbnails, if you click on them then you'll get a larger, full resolution photo. I thought this would be an easier way to show all of my pictures to those who requested it, but as it turns out, this was incredibly time consuming as I had to type in the exact coordinates of each photo i the system. But if I'm the only one who gets any value out of it, so be it...

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Just a reminder, the thumbnails sometimes take a few seconds to load up. Oh, and as a suggestion on where to look, check out Munich, Nice, Peillon (France), Milan, Venice, Ljubljana, Split, Dubrovnik, Florence, Rome, Bad Gastein, Zell am See (Austria), Vienna, Kitzbuehel (Austria). Anywhere else you look will be of photos from other trips to Europe, photos taken at home, and my mission. Knock yourself out... It is simply fantastic. I promise.