From 21 to 24 June 2007 we went to France. We first spent two days at Disneyland Paris where we stayed at Santa Fe Hotel. Then we went to Paris on Saturday and Sunday where we stayed at Hotel de la Porte Doree and visited Musée d’Orsay and Bois de Vincennes. Here are a few photos of our trip.
To view larger photos visit our photo album.
From 17 to 27 May 2007 we visited Huelva province in Andalucia, Spain. We rented Villa Laura Paraje Puente near the small town of Beas, which was a wonderful place to stay. We did some nice birding in the area’s nature reserves and visited Sevilla, Huelva, Riotinto and Tavira in Portugal. More »
At the end of May 2007 we flew to Andalusia for a 10-day holiday. We stayed outside of Beas, a village about 50 minutes west of Sevilla. We flew to Malaga on Thursday 17 May with Vueling, Spain’s new low-cost airline. Vueling claims to be Europe’s ‘next generation’ budget airline, and though we are not sure what that means, our flight was quite pleasant and we would surely fly with Vueling again in the future. More »
Last week we came back from a vacation in Andalucia in Spain. The area is perfect for birding. Highlights for us were the Purple Gallinule, Red-knobbed Coot and Azure-winged Magpie. Another great sight were the hundreds of Stork nests on almost every electricity pole along the highway between Sevilla and Huelva. Here is a list of some great places to go birdwatching. More »
Last Sunday we visited Texel! We first took an early train (7:00) from Leiden to Den Helder, which lies in the northern-most tip of Noord Holland. On the way we saw a Spoonbill and our first Crane (Kraanvogel). When we arrived in Den Helder, we took a bus to the harbor and there stepped onto the TESO ferry to Texel, which is the largest and most populated of the Dutch Frisian Islands and also the westernmost of this archipelago, which extends to Denmark. More »
Park World has a very cool report with figures for theme park attendance over 2006. Eight of the top ten parks are Disney; Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom tops the list with 16,640,000 visitors. I was also surprised to see that Disneyland Paris wasn’t doing all that bad at number five in the world with 10,600,000 visitors, just ahead of Epcot’s 10,460,000. More »
Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »
In January 2007 we traveled to The Gambia on a 9-day package tour that included flight, transfers and accomodation. We hired a guide to take us on a 5-day upriver birdwatching trip along with three hard-core Finnish birders. We did not travel independently outside of the resort area, and many of these tips are meant for those who will visit The Gambia in a similar fashion. More »
We went to The Gambia for 11 days earlier this month, and saw about 150 birds, 134 of which we managed to photograph. They have now all been added to our online lifelist. More »
From 5 to 15 January 2007 we were in The Gambia where we did a five-day birdwatching safari upriver to Georgetown and saw 177 different species of birds. I have just published a new travel photo album with 51 photos of this trip. More »