Cruisin' Down (and Up) the River

Along with friends from Monterey, Bill and Judy Webb, (with whom we also cruised to Alaska two years ago), we recently took a leisurely cruise on the “Great Rivers of Europe”, beginning in Amsterdam and leaving the ship in Vienna.

We left Heathrow on July 26th for the 40-minute flight to Amsterdam’s Schipohl Airport. From there it was a short train ride to the central station adjacent to the harbor where we boarded the River Harmony, our ship for the cruise. We were met by Bill and Judy and spent a couple of hours in the lounge visiting and starting to catch up on each others’ lives, then ate our first dinner on the ship.

After dinner we took the first of our off-ship tours – a walking tour of Amsterdam’s famous/infamous (and large) red-light district. More than anything else, it seemed pretty tawdry.

The next day, a canal boat trip around Amsterdam followed breakfast and included a stop at the Gassan diamond factory. A bit better-done than the typical tourist visit to such places. Lunch back on the ship, then to the Van Gogh museum; this Amsterdam museum has the largest collection of his work to be seen anywhere. Back to the ship and underway at 4 pm, we sailed through the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal and the first of the 166 locks and more than 500 bridges we would go through or under while on the trip. We continued sailing on the morning of the 28th, arriving in Cologne that afternoon. Highlights here were the incredible Cologne Cathedral (see:http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/730115) and the very large pedestrian-only downtown shopping area.

Subsequent days were a combination of sailing through beautiful Rhine, Main or Danube River scenery (and lots of hillside vineyards), visits to Koblenz and Mainz, off-ship tours to castles and breweries and most of a day in the beautiful small town (pop. 25,000) of Wertheim. A highlight of Wertheim was a very educational visit to a local art-glassblower’s shop (we had visited glassblowers before but never learned as much as we did here) and a “home-hosted visit”. The glassblower works with the cruise line and every time a ship from our tour company visits Wertheim, he arranges for groups of from 6 to 10 tourists to be hosted in a local home for a kaffee-klatsch and a chance to interact with each other. Our visit was to a young couple with 3 ½ and 2 year old daughters. They spoke excellent English and Chuck even tried a few sentences of his 44 year-unused German. The visit, along with the glassblower’s demonstration (and the medieval beauty of Wertheim) made that city the highlight of the trip to that point.

It’s amazing how many towns and cities there are in Germany and Austria along the Rhine, the Main and the Danube, that still have large medieval sections (some of which were actually rebuilt after World War II – to look like the original medieval buildings, but containing apartments and shops of modern design). Some of our other stops included Nuremberg, Regensburg, Passau, Rothenburg and others in Germany and Melk in Austria. After the ship’s arrival in Vienna, we stayed on for three great days in that beautiful city.

Watch this space for further articles on Nuremberg (where we visited the courtroom where Nazi war-criminals were tried); descriptions and pictures of some of the most beautiful towns and, certainly, an article on Vienna.