Travels with Mike

When I noticed that I was slipping into my dotage, I decided that I would like to have my pictures available to me no matter where I was in the world. A website seemed to be the ticket.

The pictures start in 1959. I had been in the Stanford in Germany program (third group) back then and had taken pictures as I traipsed about various parts of Europe. The developed films came back as 35mm slides where each picture was mounted in a card-board frame. I lugged these things around for decades, taking an occasional look at them with a small plastic viewer that handled one picture at a time.

The Ektachrome slides from 1959 had lost their blues and greens over the decades, so some of the pictures are kind of rust-colored, involving Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Riviera, Spain, and Switzerland, the countries I visited during my "WanderJahr". The Kodachrome slides' colors held up rather well. These old pictures are largely low quality but they work well as memory cues. I think the other pictures are rather nifty.

I started my little enterprise by running the 1959 slides through a scanner which converted them to jpgs. In the ensuing years pictures were taken with a Polaroid and they had to be cranked through another scanner to get the jpgs.

Finally digital cameras arrived and the jpgs were produced directly. For several years I contented myself with looking at all of them on my computer. By now the internet had been roaring along and a website of the pictures seemed like a good idea. So I had to learn HTML and PHP in order to present the pictures and run a slide-show, respectively. This site is the result.

These pictures are strictly amateur and they are presented "as-is", warts and all. They really keep me in touch with all the fun I've had and continue to have. My grandchildren were surprised to learn that the doddering old geezer had been around a bit.

Cheers.

Mike Munger (mpmunger@gmail.com)

The Registan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Australia 2005	Australia 2016	Austria	Belgium	England 2003
England 2014	France	Germany	Iceland	Italy
Peru	Riviera	Russia	St. Andrews	Spain
Spain	Switzerland	Tidbits	Uzbekistan