You may be right.

If you go to Monet's Gardens in Giverny, go as early in the morning as possible and go to the lilly pond as the first thing you do. By mid-morning there will be so many people around the pond that it's hard to even see much of it, let alone take any decent photos.

It’s interesting that you don’t have the lens hanging anymore but you set it up so the entire weight of camera and lens is ahead of the ball head. I would move it so the center of gravity is centered over the ball head.

An important observation.

The current row limit for Excel is 2^20 (1,048,576) – quite a lot of photos (would be for me anyway).

Depending on how anxious you are to buy the new camera, it might be worth waiting for Nikon's next sale.

My bigger problem is forgetting to change for time zones across Europe. Only really matters if my wife has remembered to change on her camera – makes it hard to put all the images together.

Nice shot, especially those vineyards where you can hardly stand.

Agree! You will see some castles and other features a bit distant from your ship on the river so more reach will be useful.

"Back order" seems to depend on where you look. This past summer I looked everywhere (on-line and at local camera retailers) for a Z6 II. Even put a deposit down at a local camera store but then found that I could get it within a week from Best Buy. Got my deposit back and they still couldn't tell me when they would get even one in stock – I guess size (buying power) matters.

My advice: keep looking.

True, Ansel Adams didn't have photoshop, but he was a grandmaster in the darkroom where he spent more time than he did in the field. Since most of his work was in black and white (at least the more famous prints), he could do an incredible job of altering the relationship between the subject and the sky and/or background (although, sometimes those were the subject). Be aware that objects can be removed in darkroom processing.

If he has Acrobat Pro, he can split the file (Optimize Pages/Extract).

I think your best option is to use one of the file-sharing sites suggested by other responders (although many companies will not allow their employees to access such sites for security reasons). If you have a friend with Adobe Acrobat Pro or Enterprise, they can split your Acrobat file for you.

Although the focus of your trip is not to take photos of flowers, I cannot imagine going to a botanical garden and not taking your macro lens.

Your 'BTW' message is the first thing I thought of when I read the original message. Why are you storing all your images on memory cards. If I'm traveling by car or some other means that allows me to have my laptop with me, I transfer filled cards to the PC, store on internal drive and also cloud storage. If no laptop, I transfer to phone or tablet via WiFi (and also cloud storage).

For photos that are in an envelope from a processing lab, I give the IMAGE the processing lab batch number plus the negative or slide number, then the print goes back in the original envelope which goes in an acid free box. (It's possible that two printed batches from two different labs could be the same, but very unlikely – haven't had that happen.) Slides have been placed in index boxes so they get a name that's appropriate for the box plus the index number. For photos that were in an old photo album, I give the album a name, then the IMAGE gets that name plus the page number plus a position number on the page (left to right, top to bottom), then the print goes back were it came from. For none of these does anything get written on the print since the name tells me where they are stored.
For all the loose prints, I give them a suffix that is sort of descriptive plus the sequence number from the scanner. This name gets written very carefully, in pencil, as lightly as possible, near the back top right corner. The prints then go in an envelope, in a acid free box.
All the names along with descriptions and scanner parameters go into an Access database so I could just give everything the index number from Access and I'm not sure why I didn't do that except that I started scanning long before I started the database and kept records on paper.