Five years ago, on 22 August 2003, we went up in a hot air balloon at the Breda Balloon Fiësta. Here are some pictures from our ride:

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On Tuesday we visited the Musee du Champignon outside Saumur, France. In the Saumur region there are many troglodyte buildings cut into the soft rock valley walls; the region produces more mushrooms than any other in France. We had a tour of the mushroom caves which included exotic specimens as well as the more common types of mushrooms grown and sold in France.

Bed of mushrooms

French grocery stores are full of delicious single-serving desserts and puddings. The other day we picked up these lemon meringue desserts and they are so yummy! Each one is like a little single-serving pie.

I think we will bring home a cooler-full.

Today we visited the Château de Villandry and its beautiful gardens, which are considered to be among the most beautiful gardens in France.

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A few weeks ago Amazon added the Universal Wish List bookmarklet button as a new feature to their already pretty awesome Wish List. It’s great!

When you have this bookmarklet in your favorites, you can add any item from any website to your Amazon wish list! I tried it with a couple of my favorite online shops and it works like a charm.

The Amazon Universal Wish List popup on Scubadorable

When you see a product - on any website! - that you want to add to your Amazon Wish List, click on the bookmarklet to bring up the Wish List pop-up. When I did this on Birdorable, the product name and correct photo default in, and I was able to enter the price and a personal note. Then I clicked on Add to Wish List and - woo hoo! - there it is.

My Wish List now showing Scubadorable jacket

After our visit to Space Expo today we also stopped by the European Sand Sculptures Festival on the boulevard in Noordwijk to see the sand sculptures. This year’s theme is In Celebration of Disney and there were eight sand sculptures based on Disney animated feature films. Some were better than others. WALL-E, Sleeping Beauty and Narnia were by far the nicest, and they were also awarded with 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively. Here are some pictures:

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Today we went to Noordwijk and visited the Space Expo exhibition and visitor center of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). The European Space Agency has sites in several European countries. ESTEC is the largest site and the technical heart of ESA. More than 2,000 rocket scientists work here on dozens of space projects. Here’s a view of ESTEC in Noordwijk, with the dunes and North Sea in the background. You can see that the scientists have their own golf course and soccer field. The building at the bottom, to the right of the soccer field, is Space Expo:

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Today we visited the new Corpus Museum in Oegstgeest, which opened on 14 March 2008. The museum is housed in an impressive 7-storey building with a statue of a large man sitting on it. Corpus features a 1-hour multimedia tour through a giant body, traveling from the stomach, through the intestines, into the heart, lungs, mouth, eyes and eventually the brain.

Photo by Rob Van Hilten

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Today we saw the magnificent Cunard cruise ship the Queen Elisabeth 2 in Rotterdam. We spotted the large red word “Cunard” by chance between a few buildings as we drove home from our dentist appointment, so we had to go check it out. We crossed the Erasmusbrug and drove passed the Cruise Terminal where all the fancy people with their pipes and hats were getting ashore and onto busses. Unfortunately we didn’t have our camera with us, but here are some great pictures from today as found on Flickr by aureliozen and vanda2006:

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What’s wrong with Kingsport? Well, it’s not Ocala. It’s also not Durango. It’s not Lakeland, Cincinnati, Nederland, or Rockford. It’s not even Asheville or Greenville. It’s not any of the dozens of places we thought we might like to live, but it was the number one pick when we went through the survey on FindMySpot.com a few months ago. We’ve done the survey a few more times since then, and Kingsport comes up in our top 10 every time.

On FindYourSpot.com you can pick your lifestyle preferences in categories like weather (we like seasons, but keep it mild, please); culture (museums & music - yes, zoos and operas - no); recreation; region (we have no particular preference); and housing cost. Affordable housing is a priority for us as we would like to buy a house.

Some other towns that come up under our preferences are Sheboygan, Wisconsin (too cold in the winter); Salem, Oregon (too far from home); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (too tornadoey).

So what’s wrong with Kingsport?