San Francisco loop.

[Southwest Dave]

By the way, do you have a map saved of the Denver trip,

There is a map on page 8 [post 73] of the Denver report ,although on checking I did notice one error between 'H' and 'I' that I will have to sort out sometime. From Telluride we continued on 145 to 62 to Ridgway and then south through Ouray and Silverton to Durango on 550, aka 'The Million dolar Highway' which is spectacular !

Out of curiosity, what type of camera do you use?

For SF and Denver I used a Fuji Finepix S9600 and on our recent trip [Highways of Happiness] I had a Fuji HS20EXR. I like the Fuji as it's probably the closest you can get to a DLSR without the expense and extra lenses, but not necessarily in the end result, the picture. Most good bridge cameras will give you excellent results and the Canon powershot, Nikon coolpix and perhaps the Panasonic Lumix will probably give better results than the Fuji HS20 on Auto mode. The thing I like about the Fuji is it feels like a DLSR to handle and you can have full manual control to compose your shot, the permanent manual zoom [up to 30x] and the ability to manually focus are 2 strong points for me, as most do not offer them and are great for capturing wildlife on the move when speed is important. Most of my photos are straight out of the camera other than perhaps a slight tweak with exposure, which makes me feel happier than creating a picture through a Photoshop program. So it takes learning and experimenting to get reasonable shots out of the Fuji, but somehow keeps me in touch with with 'real' photography like back in the day when we used prints and had one shot to get it right. It's a heavier bulkier camera to carry around than most of them out there and the lighter, easier to use cameras are popular for a reason, so you won't go far wrong with any of those for point and shoot pictures. Features like Panoramic mode, HD video and multi shot [3 captures/one image] with many scene selections and so on, are pretty much standard these days. To summarise, for ease of use and results I would look at Canon, Nikon or Lumix, but if you are looking for more control, have a basic understanding of light metering etc, and are a bit of an oddball like me, you can work to get results from the Fuji. [Now the HS30EXR I believe]

But do you think a bridge camera will be good enough to capture some of those magic 'moments'?

A decent bridge camera will be good enough, but how good the end results are still largely depend on the operator.

Dave.