Our Travel Blog

Well, as usual, all good things have to come to an end. We left the ship at 0600 (yes, six o’clock in the morning!!) to catch the transfer coach to Amsterdam airport. The rain had stopped and it was 13C (56F).

We’re now sitting in the lounge with a 3 hour wait for the flight tp Copenhagen, then on to Toronto and Ottawa. There is one luxury in the lounge that we have been missing for the last couple of weeks, fast and reliable WiFi!!! I know, first world problem.

We enjoyed the cruise, despite having to change ships half way through. In fact the transfer was pretty much seamless to us. The cases had to be packed and unpacked again, but I helped Lyn with that…… by staying well out of her way.

With only 160 or so passengers on board it was easy to get to know lot of people.

Organisation, both on board and on excursions was fantastic, of course we always had stragglers who couldn’t read a watch and turned up past the all-aboard time, but that’s not the fault of the cruise line (other than the fact they didn’t leave them behind!).

Food on board was very good, almost too fancy for us on Scenic. Although we had a gifted drinks package on Emerald and an open bar on Scenic, I doubt whether we got close to drinking enough to cover the price of the package, getting old sucks!

The cabins, particularly Emerald, were more than adequate. In fact we were surprised at the amount of room we had.

At the end of the cruise we felt that 12 days rather than 14 may have been better, but could well have been due to the fact that the last 2 stops, Cologne and Amsterdam, were not as interesting as all the previous ones.

Would we take another river cruise? Yes, if we found the right destinations, bur we would happily stick with Emerald as the cruise line of choice.

On a personal note, thanks to Dave and Karen for putting up with us! We met up with Dave and Karen (a NZ couple) at the hotel prior to boarding the ship. Scarily for Lyn and Karen, Dave and I had the same warped sense of humour that drives them both mad. They may have suffered a little when we all got together. NZ got through to the rugby final last night, England plays tonight against S. Africa for the other spot. Hopefully we get a NZ – England final (Sorry Robert!).

That’s it for this trip, the next one will be Machu Picchu and a cruise around South America in mid February.

Well, not quite the end! We knew we had a tight, but legal connection in Copenhagen, but we were 30 minutes late in leaving Amsterdam. After speed walking from one end of the airport to the other we arrived at the gate with the plane still there. Unfortunately the flight had closed! We now walked back to the Scandinavian Airlines transfer desk as Air Canada had shut up shop for the day! Scandinavian were very helpful and efficient and soon had us on a new flight 3 hours later. A slightly more circuitous route, Copenhagen, Chicago, Toronto Ottawa, but at least it gets us home. As I had a couple of hours to spare in Copenhagen I filed the 600 Euro ($900), each claim against Air Canada for a delayed flight!

US Readers ignore this paragraph!

Well, not quite the end of the end. I had forgotten how asinine it is to transfer US airports. Almost anywhere in the world where you transit through multiple countries you can do so with out having to officially enter that country, i.e. you remain “airside” and not have to go through immigration and passport control. Not the US, not only do you have to enter via passport control, you have to collect your checked luggage, take it through customs and then recheck it back to destination!! All this activity is overseen by the most disgruntled and power mad TSA agents you can imagine. All I can think of is that this process is designed to reduce unemployment.

US Readers Continue

After our reroute we were told our bags would be on the same flights as us. Wrong. Air Canada in their infinite wisdom decided to reroute our bags to the next Air Canada flight to Toronto! We may see our bags Monday

Well, it had to happen. We woke up to rain in Amsterdam, but if it had to happen this was the best place to do so. We have been to Amsterdam a couple of times before, so we weren’t missing out on anything new.

We braved the wind and rain and went off for a canal tour on one of the tour boats. Unfortunately with rain drops on the outside of the windows, and condensation on the inside (they did give us squeegees!) there wasn’t too much to see.

Last night we signed up for a tour to Haarlem, but having been outside and felt the wind and rain we cancelled that trip.

Today is therefore a day of total leisure, the boat won’t depart until new passengers board tomorrow, however we have to depart at 0600 to get to the airport for our flight to Copenhagen and then Toronto. It makes the 0800 wakeup calls seem quite civilised.

I’ll probably do a wrap-up entry tomorrow at the airport or from home.

We arrived in Cologne early this morning, it looked rather drab and dark even at 0830. I suspect being at the western end of the time zone may explain this?

After breakfast we headed out to the city centre, boy have we been spoilt with historic little towns. Cologne was almost completely destroyed during WWII, and rather than trying to reconstruct the old style of buildings, they have gone with a mish-mash of modern architecture. It didn’t impress me too much.

Below are some pictures of the city

Above to the right of the church tower is the original tower that was part of the Rathaus (Town hall), just to the right of it is the new Rathaus.

Below are shots from inside the Cathedral and some of it’s stained glass

Travelling along the Rhine this afternoon, traffic has been non stop with freight barges passing upstream almost continuously.

I said previously the river level was low, this guy didn’t listen to me.

Tomorrow will be our last full day on the boat as we arrive in Amsterdam.

Last nights entertainment was Disco Night, we didn’t last too long with that!!

For Dave and Karen, it’s the sum of a prime and a square.

We travelled overnight and arrived at Rudesheim around 0830. Today was a little warmer than previously with a temperature of 5C (41F). We will have two stops again to day, one in Rudesheim, then later on this evening we will dock at Koblenz for a few hours.

It seems we may have a water level problem again, we need 20cm (8″) of water beneath the boat to continue, currently there is just 20cm, so hopefully we will be ok.

This morning after breakfast we headed off by train to the town centre.

The main attraction for today was Siegrfrieds Mechanical Music Cabinet Museum. This museum houses hundreds of music boxes and mechanically played instruments dating back a couple of centuries. An amazing place. In addition to the usual punched paper playing pianos and organs there were many other machines, the most spectacular of which was one that also played the violin!

You can see the violins in the picture above. There are two sets of 4 violins as only one string is played on each one. There is a ring of horse hair that rotates around acting as the bow.

Some more instruments from the museum:

The picture above can be used for today’s useless trivia lesson. There were no volume controls on the old gramophones so the only way to reduce the volume was to stuff something down the horn, often an old sock. Hence the phrase “put a sock in it”.

Above is our NZ friend Dave, acting as the organ grinder, the monkey is looking very bored!!

After the museum we took a short cable car trip up the hills with the terraced vineyards.

After the trip, it is back on board for a trip through the Rhine Valley.

Unfortunately it is a little cool up on the sun-deck so not much time was spent there. Luckily the ship has a camera in the bow which can be displayed in real time on the TV in the cabin. Combine this with the panoramic windows in the cabin, and we still have a pretty good view.

That sandbar in the picture below should be well under water!

Looking astern are a number of boats following us, now that we are on the Rhine the river traffic has picked up. Perhaps they are just following to make sure we get through!!

Well, we survived the shallow waters and arrived safely at Koblenz. Unfortunately we arrived at dinner time, so didn’t get to go ashore until it was dark. We decided to go for a walk along the tow path and look for our first geo-cache of the trip. We found it! Tomorrow we are off to our last Germab stop, Cologne.

This morning we arrived in the town of Wertheim and moored up in a very convenient location, directly across from the brewery! Again it was cool starting out at 2C (36F) and climbing to 11C (52F).

Today’s organisation was to be slightly different. After breakfast we were to meet outside the ship for a walking tour of Wertheim with a little free time at the end. We would then get on a coach to be taken to Miltenberg to see a different town. Our ship would leave Wertheim and (hopefully) meet us at Miltenberg.

Both town tours were different to previous ones, with the focus being more on the every day people rather than the church and nobility. A refreshing change.

As appears the norm around here, not all tour guides are local. We thought that at least one of them must have been though as he ws dressed in lederhosen and other traditional Bavarian clothing, alas I was wrong, he was from Glasgow.

Below the first set of pictures are from Wertheim where the highlight of the tour was a visit to the glass museum and a glass blowing demonstration.

Below are some general shots fro around the town.

At the glass blowing museum we watched as a liquor glass was being formed. The glass used was similar to pyrex. Once the glass was formed and had cooled slightly the glass maker smashed it against the table pretty hard. As you can imagine this brought a large gasp from the crowd. The glass did not break or chip. We need some of those!

The next couple of pictures are a bit of an eye opener. They make glass eyes. Below a re a selection of eyes.

Here is a brief outline of how they progress from a small tube to the finished eye

A few more pictures of the town on our way back (via a coffee shop). It’s not too clear but the black writing on the white are the flood levels that the river has reached over the last 700 years. The highest ever level was about 3m (10ft) above the top of the white board.

After this visit, we boarded the coach to continue on to Miltenberg. It is amazing how green and forested that Germany is.

Below are some shots of Miltenberg. Both towns were considerably smaller and less busy than previous ones that we had visited, with almost no traffic. English was not as common here as it had been previously and credit cards were not accepted in a number of stores.

Gumi bears seem to be popular around here, and the local proprietor came out with an assortment of freebies for us to try. Not exactly a bear, but it tasted good. There was a choice of sweet, sour, sugar free, chilli and a couple more. His plot must have worked as I saw a number of tour passengers in the shop later.

Above is a sign out side a brewery. The star hanging below it loos like the Star of David, but it is not. It is the sign of a recognised brewery. The upward pointing triangle representing the heat or flames going up and the downward facing one is water or rain coming down. As long as the two are held in balance when brewing the beer alles ist gut!

It has been a bit of a bumpy ride along the river today, not the rough water but the narrow locks (or should that be the wide boats). I was watching from the balcony and there was about 1inch space between the rubber block and the side of the lock wall. We moved away from the lock wall about four inches and bounced off the other side. Not much room to spare. A slight longer blog today, hope it wasn’t too boring.