Tue 02 January 2007

I left Jerusalem before 5 o’clock, and drove to Ben Gurion airport, where I returned the car to the rental. The trip meter showed 3015 km, of which 65 km were driven this morning.

The next three hours were consumed in the usual security checks, the girls at the security desk suspiciously tasting the honey that I bought in Jericho, and all my luggage combed thoroughly with a number of electronic devices.

My first flight was to Frankfurt, where I had one hour time to change the plane to a flight leaving for Helsinki. An hour sounded a long time to me, and I felt hungry, so I went to McDonald’s at Frankfurt airport and ordered some takeaway food.

This proved to be a very bad idea, but I did not realize it before I went to the security check, and the lady went pale when she noticed how little time I had left before the flight would take off. She told me to take my hand luggage and run as fast as I can. This I also did, but the distance to the platform was surprisingly long — a kilometer or two I guess — and my hand luggage was quite heavy (possibly a bit heavier than would be officially permitted).

All other passengers were already in the plane, and the captain was about to close the gate, when I arrived running and dragging my heavy hand luggage. The captain rose his eyebrows, and commented ironically that the distance to the gate is a bit longer than many believe...

I entered the plane, and then we flew home.





 

• My best photos of each site are in the Common Ground section of this website. The underlined links in this travel report lead mostly to related pages in the Common Ground section.
   
• The photo links in the text lead to full-screen images, with the filename ending “_l.jpg”. Yet larger versions of the images can be found by changing the ending into “_xl.jpg”. (A few images with blurred focus are not available in large size.)
   
• The first characters in filename indicate the estimated view angle of each panorama photo: a file whose name begins with “360_” is a full 360° panorama, a file whose name begins with “180_” is a 180° panorama, and so on. The reported view angles are rough estimations only.
   
• My camera on this journey was Olympus µ700, a compact and inexpensive tourist camera. But the term “tourist camera” no longer means poor quality: it simply means that the camera is affordable, light to carry, and small enough to fit in the pocket.
  
  To my great delight Olympus µ700 also had a durable battery that easily lasted all day long, while I took up to 300 photos during the day. I had a spare battery in pocket, because I assumed that the battery would not last all day, but this assumption proved wrong, and I never needed the spare battery. (I took all photos without flashlight, so anyone who enjoys spoiling his photos with the flashlight cannot rely on these reports of battery lifetime.)
   
• The panoramas were blended from ordinary photos, using MGI PhotoVista 2.02, which is an old and simple program — there are many newer and probably much better softwares on the market.
  
  I first tried to do the blending work with brand new software from another company, but the program got entirely stuck with the huge amount of image data that is involved in a set of 15 or 20 photos with resolution 3072 x 2304 pixels, the blended panorama becoming something like 22000 x 2500 pixels (which is 70 times bigger than the common screen resolution 1024 x 768 !).
  
  Having failed with the brand new software (or not having the patience to wait so long as it would have taken to complete the process), I took the good old MGI PhotoVista 2.02 from my dusty archives, and it did the massive blending job quickly and without greater problems. PhotoVista made many big mistakes in the blending process, though, which I had to repair manually with a photo editor.