Often scientific conferences are held at nice places, but I never attended a conference at Disney World before! This year’s SPIE Medical Imaging conference took place at Disney’s Coronaro Springs Resort, right in the middle of Disney World. This resort is built around a lake, dotted with palm trees and hammocks. The weather was amazing and between sessions there was time to take a quick swim in the heated swimming pool, a drink at the bar, or short nap in the sun.
The day before the conference we visited NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. It was really impressive to walk through a space shuttle, to try and fit in the cockpits of different rockets and to see how and where the space shuttles are launched.
Of course we couldn’t leave without at least visiting one of the Disney theme parks, so yesterday we bought a half day ticket to the Magic Kingdom, the classical Disney park, with rides such as Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean. Even though our ticket was only valid from 16-20h we still had enough time to see most of the park. The day ended with some amazing fireworks.
The conference itself was of course very useful as well, but I won’t bore you with the details. Have a look at the pictures.

Steve Huff, who runs a very nice Leica blog, started a Leica M9 give-away contest. To compete you had to send in two images that told a story.
After some thinking I chose to make pictures of my mom, as title I chose: “Free as a bird in her own world”. The pictures should tell the rest.

Update

We made it to the finals! Steve Huff is posting 3 pictures every day that go to the finals. When I received Edward’s comment on this blog-post this morning I found out that we were selected as one of the 15 finalists. The other images are amazing as well, so the competition is very tough. I recommend you to go ahead and have a look at the other images.

Update 2

Well, I didn’t win, but hey, at least I have a great picture of my mom!