Is this thread off-topic? Oh, well. Might as well add some fuel to the fire...

I'd recommend a camera without proprietary batteries (as most/all of the Sonys have). I have an Olympus C-4040 that takes rechargable AA's and in a pinch will accept alkaline AAs.

Bware ofcameras that don't have an optical viewfinder. The LCD viewfinder is the biggest consumer of battery power on the camera. With an optical viewfinder you can leave the LCD off while you're taking pictures.

Count on taking more pictures with the digital than you would with a film camera. So you'll either need a couple of 128Meg or larger cards or some means of moving the pictures off of the card onto something else. There are devices (one of which has the trade name "digital wallet") that are essentially a hard drive, battery pack and card reader rolled into one so you can have what amounts to unlimited picture storage - certainly enough for a trip of a week or two.

3 meg pixels is OK for most photos but I went ahead and got a 4 meg camera so hopefully I won't want to upgrade again quite as soon. You're looking at $500-700 IMO.