I never thought it would work this well! (And it wasn't until I looked at one of the responses on the Retouching Forum, where a guy had used content aware fill). This is a screen grab of the result after I loosely used the lasso tool (unfeathered) and the hit the delete key with content-aware fill selected. Pretty amazing, isn't? You can see the thread about this challenge here: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=41795064