[Leica] Lessons Learned and Germany Trip

[jim.christie at sbcglobal.net (Jim Christie)]

For what it is worth, I've sort of been on the sidelines the last couple of 
weeks for the following reason. My hard drive crashed as a result of my 
trying to repartition it to give more room of the "C" partition for working 
with Photoshop and it took a week for my first service company (CompUSA) to 
determine that they couldn't slavage it or my data. I then took it to a 
company called DiskSavers and after a week they are at least working towards 
salvaging my data (especially a lot of pictrures, Word and Excel docs and 
hopefully saved Email). I should have the final results from DiskSavers by 
early next week. In the mean time, I did acquire a new hard drive and a 
backup hard drive, so now I'm ready to go forward. Lessons learned; (1) I 
will never again try to repartition my hard drive myself and (2) backing up 
data will become a weekly routine going forward.

Now for some really exciting news. My wife and I will be in Germany for two 
weeks beginning Thursday of next week on a Leica and Reeds Camera sponsored 
photography trip. We've done this once before, but that trip focused on 
southern Germany and Austria (what a beautiful trip). This time we will be 
starting at Wetzlar and Solms and then to Helmstedt, Berlin, Potsdam, 
Dresden, Meissen (my wife is looking forward to the fine china shopping), 
then back to Wetzlar and then home. Since I do not yet have my DMR back for 
my R-8 yet, I've decided to take my Digilux 2 and M-7, with my 35 mm lens 
and I plan to borrow a 50 mm lens from Leica and I'll probably throw in my 
Tri-Elmar as well.

I'm really looking forward to this trip. Any thoughts or suggestions are 
welcomed.

Jim