Route du Vine Alasce

The wine growing region of Alsace is alone the slope of Vosges Mountain facing west between Strasbourg and Mulhouse.  We could see this vast expanse of land on our right when driving south from Strasbourg, on our left hand side is Rhine river that separates France from Germany in this area.  However, the best way of exploring this wine growing region is following the Route du Vine Alsace along the foot of Vosges Mountain.  Along the way, there are many villages all involved in wine making and some of them are very historical.  There are also many vineyards open for tasting and shopping.  Since it is impossible for us to bring wine on the airplane back to Taiwan, we did not stop to visit any of them.

This simple image is more complicated to produce than it appears.  Two photographs were taken one focused on the flowers and the other focused at the distant vine.  In order to maintain the correct prospective, I was almost lying on the ground.  The images were then stacked together in Photoshop to create an image that everything is in focus.

It is normally not an issue for point-and-shoot camera and it is less an issue even for D7000 which is DX format.  The smaller sensor in these cameras create images with deeper depth-of-field, which means it is easier to get everything in focus.  For the FX format cameras, such as D700, we have to pay more attention.

The is the car that we drove around during our trip to Champagne, Lorraine and Alsace.  We rented the car from Hertz through Hotwire, a reasonably priced medium-size car with standard gearbox.  I printed all the road directions from google map but we still did not feel confident enough.  We asked for an addition of GPS unit at the rental car counter in the airport.  They had to charge a reasonable amount of fees for the GPS, which we agreed.  However, there was no portable GPS to add to the car and they gave us a free upgrade.  I only found out when I had the key to the car that they gave us a brand new automatic Mercedes with built-in GPS.  It had less than 3000 km on it and it drove like a dream.  It ran on diesel, for the whole three-day trip that took us from Paris to Alsace and back, it used only one tank of gas.  The GPS worked great, could not imagine how lost we would be if we did not have it.