Deep Zoom Photo Map

I decided to try out the Deep Zoom Composer and create a Deep Zoom Image of our trip using Microsoft Silverlight. The results are posted in the top box in the right pane. If you don't have Silverlight installed, it is about a 2 minute download and installation process, and well worth the effort.

Silverlight is Microsoft's new web technology that does everything Flash does and a lot more. In the Deep Zoom map, I've laid out some of my favorite photos from the trip in the vicinity in which they were taken. To explore the Deep Zoom image, you can grab the map and move it within the frame, and when you hover over one of the small pictures you can click to zoom in. The arrows will take you backward and forward to spots you've already 'visited'.

You can't really appreciate the full capability within the small space available in Blogger; a larger version would show the high resolution the photos are stored in, within the high resolution map.

Deep Zoom Composer is available as a free download from Microsoft, and the image itself is hosted for free at http://www.deepzoompix.com/. It was very easy to import my photos and lay them out on the picture of the map. Give it a try with your own pictures! I chose to lay mine out on a map, but you can layer and organize yours in any way your creativity inspires you.

The Best of the May Walkabout

Now that we are back home, we thought we'd capture the 'bests' from our trip. Here they are, in no particular order...

The best place we didn't stop, and would like to return to see: Lake Coeur D'Alene, in Idaho. We drove by it on the way home, and thought it was one of the most beautiful places we had seen:

Best souvenirs: Deb's charm bracelet from Carmel, and Steve's Mount Rushmore mug, which matches his favorite Lake Powell mug.

Food...

Best home cooked meal: ham cooked in Coke at Sally's. Best brew pub: Bend Brewing Company in Oregon, where we had a beer sampler, calamari for an appetizer and salmon pizza. Best pizza at Campisi's, in Dallas:

We had pizza with Sally and Art at the original Campisi, known as the Egyptian Lounge when Jack Ruby ate there the night before shooting Lee Harvey Oswald:

In a typical Internet "walkabout", I ended up reading 50 pages of the deposition Joe Campisi gave about his association with Ruby - and all I was trying to do was get a picture of the restaurant back in 1963, when Ruby ate there. So easy to go off on a tangent, on the Internet....

Best hotel: The Driskill, in Austin.

Best chain hotel: Fairfield Inn. After saying in an earlier post that our plan to stay at Marriott hotels wasn't working for us, we stayed at Fairfields in Bend, Seattle, Bozeman, Rapid City and Rockford IL - basically, the whole end of the trip with the exception of Portland, where we stayed at the Mark Spencer. We found the Fairfields to be a good value, plus their consistency was a welcome comfort on the long trip home.

We received our best insight on the final day of the trip, from a nice man working breakfast at the Rockford hotel. It had opened only weeks before, and was lightly booked. They had upgraded us to a suite, and were taking good care of their relatively sparse clientele. When I was getting breakfast, I told one exceptionally helpful gentleman that I was well acquainted with their breakfast setup, since we had stayed at so many Fairfields in the last month. He asked about our trip and why we were traveling so long. I explained that we were investigating possible places to relocate to and he asked me what we had learned from our walkabout. I said 'that no place is perfect', and he replied 'yes -- not until you make it so'.

It was an insight worth driving 7500 miles for.

The Drive Home: The Corn Palace

The other big event of Day Three was stopping by Mitchell SD to see the Corn Palace. We learned about the Corn Palace from our friend, Rick, who said it was a 'must see'.

The Corn Palace is an entertainment venue whose front is decorated each year with corn cobs specially grown to adorn the Corn Palace. This is how it looks in 2009:

We were fortunate to see the Corn Palace completely decorated, in its full glory, because we may have arrived while they were busy redoing it for the new year.

The corn cobs are cut in half, longwise, and stapled to the front to create the intricate designs. I've built a little montage of the five main panels currently gracing the Corn Palace exterior:


The designs were very topical, since we had just come from Mount Rushmore, had seen the Space Needle in Seattle, and the space shuttle was landing while we were there.

To make things even more perfect, I was able to get this shot of Steve with 'Mr. Corn':

I may be joking around a little, but it was actually a fun stop, and yet another reminder that all of America does not live on the coasts and we are a diverse and interesting country. It is worth noting that a performer coming soon to the Corn Palace was David Cook, the winner of last year's American Idol. He is a great and contemporary performer, I voted for him myself, so the Corn Palace gets some pretty good acts...