The Party Bus

In 2000 while living in Philadelphia, I decided to save up and then take a month off work to travel the world a little. Now for Americans, this isn't standard practice. And being single and on the cheap, I found that Contiki Tours to be perfect. They specialize in the 18-35 crowd and just jump from city to city very quickly, staying in 1.5* hotels. They give you quick tours of the major highlights and then whisk you off to the next spot. Great way to see an area quick, get the highlights, meet a bunch of new people and see the sights. In those 29 days, I saw England, France, Spain, Lichtenstein, Italy, Greece, Vatican City, Monaco, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. I used my Pentax ZX-50 film camera, film, and really did a piss-poor job as I knew nothing about the proper settings or lighting or.. well anything. I took 13 rolls and maybe slowly I'll start letting them trickle in here.

I found this bus stoically parked near the castle in St. Goar, Germany one of the many stops they make. I can't even tell you how crazy the people on bus were. And the things we did, but we all stuck it out.

Needless to say one of my favorite songs of all time keeps playing around in my head ever time I think of this crazy bus trip....

I actually do have a couple of those shots from 2000 scanned in and on here, some of my first photos ever on Flickr. Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland and then this photo in Venice, Italy was my Most Interesting photo for probably a year before I knew anything about taking real photos.

Looks like most of my scans of the photos were done at such a poor resolution and size that I'd have to do most of them over. Which is a good thing bc now that I look at them, it brings back a lot of memories. Not all the memories, because some of them were killed off by the amount of beer consumed on that trip.