Painted image (1280x825 sized imgs)

Hi everyone! I've read a couple of tuts about making an image look like a painting, but haven't done a great job with it thus far:( Here's the original and what I tried ... any advice would be greatly appreciated please on doing this better!! I'm posting slightly larger photos so they're easier to work with, but didn't want to post the very large originals!

Original:

Painted:

These pics were taken with the 300D+kit lens on a flight I took down the coast of Florida. More photos from this flight can be found in my album if you're curious.

There's also the issue with the window reflection ... if anyone has a good way to remove that, I'd love to hear it as well, but that's secondary to me at this point!

Thanks for any help!!!

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KK
http://imageevent.com/kzmokramr2