Back in Baltimore

I will be writing a series of absentee BLOGS while Michelle and I are on vacation. I'll be letting everyone know where we are and what we will be doing each day.

Well as this posts we are probably getting ready to head back under the Cheasapeake Bay Bridge once again as we head back to the Port of Baltimore and get ready for disembarkation.

Last year it took us a while to get off the boat, but we learned if you are driving and park at the terminal, you will be the first to be let off the boat and go back through customs one final time before returning to our car Pearl.

It has hopefully been a great vacation and you may see a live blog from me this morning after this one posts to discuss how our trip really did go. I can tether my phone, something I could not do at this time last year with AT&T, so I'll have internet available to me once we hit the bay.

We will be returning to Morgantown today and spending the day getting unpacked.

I'm already looking forward to next years cruise, but we're talking about flying to Miami and departing from there to find some new and different ports to visit.

We're back.

Freeport Bahamas

I will be writing a series of absentee BLOGS while Michelle and I are on vacation. I'll be letting everyone know where we are and what we will be doing each day.

Well today we will visit our third and final port when we dock in Freeport  Bahamas. Last year we didn't venture very far from the boat as there are a bunch of local shops around the dock. So when we visited last year it was raining and you have to travel to the local town to really do anything.

Last year we enjoyed the little shops, but this year as of the time of me writing this blog, I'm exploring options on things to do for this port. I'm still exploring excursions for this port, knowing we were planning on snorkeling at the previous two ports, we'll have to see what we can fins here to spice it up a little.

Tomorrow is a day at seas as we start to head back to our home Port in Baltimore.

Grand Turk

I will be writing a series of absentee BLOGS while Michelle and I are on vacation. I'll be letting everyone know where we are and what we will be doing each day.

Well we are visiting our first of three ports today, we are in Grand Turk and guess where we will be eating lunch at today? You guessed it, Margaritaville where you can find the worlds best calamari. This will be our lunch today, the rest of the day will be filled with snorkeling in the Ocean.

The water there is crystal clear and there is little to no vegetation in the water due to the high salinity content and the higher temperatures. This makes snorkeling optimal in my opinion and this will be what we will be most of the day.

Last year we did one video log, and it was after we visited Grand Turk. I'll try to do one for every day during the vacation, but I tried to do that last year as well.




Half Moon Cay, Carnival's private Island and our favorite port to snorkel is where we will be tomorrow.

A Geographical update.

For you geography geeks out there like myself, Google Earth has updated the extent of their orthophoto imagery in the Morgantown area. Placed that were not available before or were just Satellite imagery are now low resolution imagery.

Kim's, Pam's, Michelle's, My place and numerous other places are now available from google in Google Earth and Google Maps.

There were other online programs with more complete imagery such as Flashearth that feeds from all the map sources, but Google Earth is my favorite stand alone geography application.

National Map and National Atlas

One of the hardest things to do is explain to people what it is I do for a living. How do you explain something that many people haven't seen.

There were two interactive sites that I found over the weekend (I already knew about them) that may help others understand a little better.

The federal government is doing a National Map that actually uses an IMS server to let the viewer play with an interactive map.

There is also a National Atlas that has a user friendly Map Maker feature.

Google Maps / Earth moves to next level

Google has pushed the envelope a little further in internet mapping.

LINK

They are starting to ring in localized images of people.