Rhine River Cruise With Sharon
SEPT. 29, 2006: Switzerland. Our seven-plus hour flight from Atlanta landed in Zurich around 7:15 a.m. Sharon succeeded in getting us exit row seats on the plane, and we had side-by-side aisle and window seats, which made the flight a lot more comfortable.
We opted to go straight to Lucerne rather than to rest in Zurich, and the plan worked well. The one-hour train trip from the airport to Lucerne was enjoyable, and our Radisson Hotel was adjacent to the station. They let us check in around 9:30 a.m., and we went right to sleep.
The Radisson room was pretty funky, kind of art deco with lots of white plasticky furniture and opaque glass separating the shower from the room. The person taking a shower is silhouetted in the room. But overall the place was very enjoyable, including the décor.
We awoke around 1 p.m. and started a long afternoon/evening of sightseeing. We caught another train to a small town about a half hour from Lucerne, and then took the cog railway about 7,000 feet straight up Mt. Pilatus. It takes about a half hour to make the ascent and it is quite an experience. The train goes at an angle that is very, very steep, and chugs slowly up the side of the mountain, at times going through tunnels cut into the mountain’s face.
The prettiest views from the cog railway, at least on this semi-overcast day, were from about a third of the way up as we looked back at Lake Lucerne. The view was less dramatic from above. At the top is a small hotel and restaurant. We had a light lunch and sat outside as the temperature started to dip. By the end of the meal, we were ready to get out of the chill.
We chose to take the suspended cable cars back down the mountain, and it was even more dramatic than the climb to the top. A very large car with standing room for about 25 people takes the first dive from the top. Then you get off and switch to four-person cars for the rest of the trip. Sharon and I got our own cable car with no one else on board. Overall, the ride took about 20 minutes and was thrilling and a bit scary. You finally descend right into Lucerne and walk away into the town.
We wandered and explored for a little while, and then caught a Lucerne city bus to an old section of town. From there, we walked across the 700-year-old Chapel Bridge and took photos. The bridge empties onto an old road that goes to some historic hotels that overlook Lake Lucerne. We spent a couple of hours having drinks and looking at the lake from various spots along this road.
By 7:30 we were very hungry after all the walking and finally settled, after a couple of miscues, on an old restaurant with a sidewalk café. We ordered the rack of lamb for two and soon proclaimed it the best we have ever had. It was encased in some sort of bread and herb crust and surrounded by all sorts of colorful vegetables and potatoes au gratin. When we finished one plateful, they went to the kitchen and reloaded with another set of everything. We walked back across the lake stuffed and ready to sleep after a busy day.
SEPT. 30: Lucerne and Basel, Switzerland/Breisach, Germany: We awoke at 5 a.m. after a jetlag-plagued fitful sleep. The hotel buffet breakfast, which Sharon convinced the manager to give us for free, was quite good. The bread was all fresh and they had all sorts of fruit and hot offerings. I especially liked the bread and Swiss cheese.
We caught the 7:45 train to Basel, and arrived about an hour later. A cab took us to our ship and check-in took about two minutes. The room size was tiny -- payback for the half-price fares we found for the trip or our day-late check-in, I guess. But we shrugged it off and unpacked. There was some boring downtime as it rained and we waited a couple of hours to sail. Sharon napped and I worked on photos and this travel log.
The ship itself holds about 200 passengers and is clean, but rather small. Many cabins are larger than ours, but none of them have balconies because Rhine ships can’t be very wide. My architect wife estimates our cabin to be about 110 square feet altogether. Being on a Viking River Cruise is like shopping at H.G. Hill or eating at Belle Meade Cafeteria. The older passenger demographic makes you feel young even if you are not. But we did see a handful of couples in our age range. Most of the senior passengers appear to be the energetic go-getter types anyway.
We had lunch on the ship and boarded buses at 2 p.m. for a four and a half hour tour of the Black Forest. The tour of the rural areas of southwest Germany was interesting, but our guide wasn’t. He wandered from one subject to another, and his English wasn’t very good. People from the other buses had far more favorable reports about their guides.
We stopped in a small town called St. Mary’s, which was very cute. German towns we saw were very quaint, well maintained and beautifully landscaped. Sharon and I went to an outdoor café near the cathedral and shared a table with a German couple. They were very friendly and welcoming.
The next stop was for an hour at a place once visited by Marie Antoinette while she was on her way to her wedding. She arrived there with an entourage of 35 carriages and all sorts of soldiers and servants. It’s doubtful this stop was as touristy during her visit as it was today. There was a huge souvenir shop, a restaurant, a hotel and little else. It was in a pretty setting, though, so we sat outside. Sharon had beers and I had coffee.
Dinner back at the ship was multiple choice, and we again selected lamb. It wasn’t as good as the previous night’s, but overall the food was good and the company was enjoyable. You can sit wherever you want so it gives you an opportunity to meet and get to know the other passengers.
We danced in the lounge for a while, then went to the cabin and watched Red Eye, a thriller about a terrorist on a jumbo jet. Then we went to sleep.
OCT. 1, Strasbourg, France: We awoke at about 7:30 and had a Sunday brunch of poached eggs, sausage and really good bread. We had a short stop at the cabin and then boarded busses that took us from the town of Kehl on the German side of the river across a bridge into France. You don’t always go to a formal port to dock the boat. At Kehl they simply pulled up alongside a city park in a nice residential area and threw down a gangplank. Busses picked us up there.
The trade agreements between the two countries allow anyone to come and go between France and Germany as they please without any checks or stops. There aren’t even signs that say “Welcome to France” or “Welcome to Germany”. In fact, there has been little in the way security or passport checks for us at all. The immigration guy at Zurich airport glanced at, but didn’t even stamp, our passport. We haven’t needed it since and we have been in three European countries so far.
The German-French relationship, though free in terms of travel and trade, is still obviously strained. People in Strasbourg have seen their citizenship switch back and forth numerous times during and after various German occupations. The French go to Germany to buy their smokes because prices are less there, and Germans buy their wine and booze in France for the same reason. But there is a pretty clear cultural line between the two nationalities in terms of language and loyalties.
Strasbourg gets two enthusiastic thumbs up from us. Its historic areas are as vast and beautiful as those of Paris, and the town has everything you can want. Great sights, great restaurants, nice shops and beautifully maintained historic areas.
The first hour of our visit there featured a bus tour of the city. Our guide this time was great. Strasbourg is a big center of the European Union, with courts and various international government buildings covering a large section of town. The area around St. Stephen’s Cathedral was the most touristy, but also very nice. We visited the cathedral and walked around “downtown” for a few hours. We had a lunch of ham and cheese on French bread that was excellent. Then we walked some more until about 3 p.m., when we caught a city bus back to the ship in Germany. Sharon enjoyed looking at the 700-year-old architecture and took an annoying number of pictures of windows, roofs and other architectural features. I kid her about this a lot.
I mentioned earlier that the travelers on the ship were mostly seniors, but many were energetic. Four of them did all the walking tours in Strasbourg, then walked back to our boat in Germany – a trek that took two and a half hours. They were seen again on the dance floor that night.
We took a long nap after returning to the Viking Sun, and then had a five course dinner featuring fish and filet mignon. Very good. We met some nice people from San Francisco and Orlando at our table. The lounge featured a couple singing French songs for about a half hour after dinner. Then we danced again to the standards played by the Bulgarian piano player-singer and went to bed around 11. We got to do rumba, swing, cha cha, foxtrot and salsa. Overall, it was a very fun day.
OCT. 2: On the River, then Speyer, Germany: This turned out to be a pretty slow day, although it did have a few interesting parts. We had a nice breakfast on the ship and then rested for most of the rest of the morning as the Sun headed from Kehrn to Speyer. We had to travel through some locks, and the trip took about eight hours on the river.
Sharon read and went to a beer and barbecued pig roast at 11. I slept up until lunchtime. We both had salad and a steak sandwich. We visited with some people from Florida during lunch.
We left the ship around 3 and did a walking tour of Speyer. It is a pretty town in which religious history overrides all else. The huge Catholic cathedral, built around 1000, dominates the skyline. It has been attacked and set afire on various occasions, including one attack on Speyer by Napoleon. He had promised not to attack the cathedral while laying siege to the rest of town, so all the citizens stored their furniture in the church for safekeeping. The furniture filled half of the enormous cathedral. But flames from the rest of the attack caught the roof of the cathedral. That, in turn, spread to the furniture and pretty soon they had a partially destroyed cathedral.
Now the Cathedral has many distinct sections, some from the original building and some built after various attacks. Several emperors are buried in the building and its recent history includes visits by Pope John Paul II and another by Gorbachev.
We also visited a Jewish prayer house and bath house that were rented to the town’s Jewish population by the Catholic bishop around 1,000 years ago for four times the going rate. The Jews believed in bathing for sanitary and religious purification reasons. The Catholics of the time did not. They instead put heavy doses of powder on their bodies, but never bathed even though there was a river nearby. When disease hit the Christians but not the bathing Jews, the Christians blamed the Jews for their woes and banished them from Speyer after taking all their possessions.
There’s also a Lutheran church in Speyer whose construction followed the Reformation. For a long time after its construction, there was an effort to banish Catholics from the town, much like what was done to the Jews by the Catholics. Now everyone’s back and worshipping in Speyer, but some ugly history hangs everywhere.
After the walking tour, rain started falling pretty steadily and the temperature dropped to around 50. I wanted to stay in town, but Sharon wanted to get back to the boat. Sharon prevailed. I did get to spend 20 minutes in an Internet café. So we spent all but two hours of this day on the ship. Kind of a letdown both weather and activity-wise.
Dinner back at the ship was very good. Sharon and I split some chicken and fish dishes. Afterwards, we danced and teamed up with some fellow passengers to play in a trivia game organized by the crew. Our team was nicknamed the Guessers. We finished third.
OCT. 3: Mannheim and Heidelburg: I woke up very early – 4:30-ish, and went to the top deck for coffee. They have fresh coffee available free all the time so this was convenient. I read some background material about Germany and the trip, then played with the computer and read a book. Then I napped until it was time for our excursion from our port in Mannheim into Heidelberg.
The rain situation is getting old. It has rained for about two straight days without let-up, and it is becoming a factor. But we went ahead and took our tour of Heidelberg, much of it in the pouring rain. Our guide, Margaret, was very enthusiastic and just ignored the weather. If she wanted to explain something in the middle of the sidewalk for five minutes, she did so without any regard for the downpour. I have a rain jacket and Sharon brought an umbrella, so we were outfitted pretty well anyway. I just worry about the camera and computer getting wet, which they didn’t.
We started out with a bus tour of Mannheim an industrial center right on the Rhine. Karl Benz, the automobile inventor and founder of Mercedez Benz, lived here and one of the company’s plants is here. So is a big John Deere plant. I also noticed a huge BASF plant while we were riding around. Benz was the inventor, but his wife was the marketer in the family. She wanted him to showcase his invention back in the 1880s, but city fathers limited him to a 6 km ride every once in a while. His defiant wife took the kids and the car and went on a regional tour, apparently with out his knowledge, to gain publicity for the auto. She would fill the car up with alcohol-based concoctions from local pharmacies. The resulting publicity apparently helped, and her ride is re-enacted every year.
Heidelberg is a great town, and a big college center. The problem is that the homes are so nice that students can’t afford to live here and either have to share flats or live in other towns and commute. Modest looking houses along the river cost 4 million Euros – more than $5 million. The city itself is picturesque, hilly and very interesting. We stopped for quite a while at a castle that overlooks the whole town and took pictures and walked around there. The castle, for some unknown reason, is also the home of the German Apothecary Museum, and we toured that and learned about the history of pharmaceuticals.
Our tour ended on the town square. I found an Internet café and uploaded pictures and answered e-mails while Sharon shopped. She found some very cute Christmas ornaments. The we had lunch together at a bakery-restaurant. We both had meatballs and potato salad and both were very good. I tried the cherry cheesecake, too.
While we were touring, the boat traveled to the unappetizingly named city of Worms. We boarded there and headed for Rudesheim, a reputed party town. It was pouring the whole trip, but it was interesting traveling through the city of Mainz by river. We had a tilapia dinner complete with all sorts of other courses. We have been “adopted” by a group of eight other lively passengers, most of them from Dayton, Ohio. They sit together every night and had two open seats. We joined them the past two nights. Sharon went out beer-drinking with them this evening while I opted to stay in and read.
OCT 4: Rudesheim/Koblenz: I woke up very early and went walking around Rudesheim. It is a very nice place, but very quiet early in the morning. I noticed some cafes don’t open until 8:30 even on a weekday.
We had breakfast around 8:30 and then took some bus-train vehicles into the middle of town. We thought about blowing off a tour of a music machine museum and going exploring instead. But we went on the museum tour and were very glad we did. The machines dated back to the early 1800s and some of them were enormous and interesting. There was one machine, for instance, that contained a piano and violins. Sheets of perforated paper like are used in a player piano drove the concert-producing machines and they sounded like a multi-piece orchestra.
I kept thinking how much fun it would be to own one of these things. One had drums, a piano, an accordion, cymbals, all sorts of things.
We then went to a café and to a local shop for Christmas ornaments. Germany is the Christmas ornament center of the world, with almost every block having a Christmas ornament place.
Our boat sailed around lunchtime and it went through the prettiest section of the Rhine, an area known as the Middle Rhine. This section is hillier than the others and therefore was prime territory for castles that served as defensive fortifications. Rulers would place a castle on each side of the Rhine and stretch a chain down the middle Ships would have to pay the castle operators to have the chain lowered so they could pass. The castles also served as protection against frequent attacks by the French centuries ago.
Sharon went on a visit to Marksburg Castle, one of the best preserved and biggest of these castles. The Japanese liked it so much that a group of businessmen offered $250 million Euros – more than $300 million – to buy it, dismantle it and move it to Japan. The Germans declined the offer, so the Japanese built an exact replica at an amusement park there.
While Sharon did the castle junket, I sailed with the ship to Koblenz, then got off and walked around the town. I also went to an Internet café. Sharon’s tour group later took a bus from the castle to Koblenz to catch up with us.
We had dinner with our new friend at Table 17, and then went into town with them. The couples are Ron & Jo Ann Catanzaro, Charlie & Judy Mayer, Joe and Mary Ann Smith, and Ron & Carol Marshall.( I think I have these names right.)The last couple lives in New Hampshire, while the rest are from Dayton.
Our group wanted a wild beer drinking place with music, but Koblenz turned out to be a very quiet place with no such bars. We stopped at a place called Havana’s, which had a Cuban theme, then went back to the boat. Joe, Mary Ann, Sharon and I went to a place called Bernie’s, which was fantastic. We wished the other friends were with us.
Back at the ship, Sharon and I persuaded Nickie the Bulgarian piano player to play a couple of more dance numbers and then we went to bed.
OCT. 5: Cologne, Germany: Now here’s a wild, busy town. Cologne dates back 2,000 years to the days when the Romans built it. Then most of it was destroyed during the War. But what remains is a very interesting and fun place with 1 million residents. We would put it on the list with Salsbourg, France, and Heidelberg, Germany, as places we would like to visit again.
We had breakfast and began a walking tour of the city at 9 a.m. Our boat moored right alongside the historic area near the Cathedral, so it didn’t take long to get started. Our guide was very well-spoken and knowledgeable about the various places we toured. Cologne is a big beer-producing and drinking town, and he spent considerable time describing the festivals, the products produced by 20 breweries in Cologne, and the unique glasses used to serve Kolch, the town’s native brew.
The Cathedral was the highlight of the tour. While we have seen beautiful cathedrals in every German city, Cologne’s was the biggest and best. It took more than 600 years to build, and about 25 consecutive generations of people in Cologne helped make it a reality. Like most of the German cathedrals, this one has plenty of Catholic and papal politics behind its story. Exiled bishops, political cat-and-mouse games, all sorts of intrigue are woven into its history. The church itself is garish in its detail, but has some nice features, too. The thing I liked most was the sunlight that shined inside the church through stained glass windows, unlike many dark Baroque and Renaissance churches we have seen.
We saw pictures of Cologne in 1945, and pretty much everything was destroyed or flattened by the allies except the Cathedral. It was an ugly sight after the war. But the town has rallied well to restore its dignity and charm. The restaurants and beer halls are everywhere, and they are very nice.
Sharon and I had lunch at the Sion BrauHouse, which was enormous. The food was great and way too rich. A note about how the beer is served in Cologne: It comes in a test tube-shaped glass that holds about 8 ounces. Kolch beer is not pasteurized and is purposely kind of flat. It is assumed you will keep drinking, so beer is regularly brought your way when you are near empty. Your coaster serves as your tally sheet and the waiter marks your coaster with a grease pencil every time he brings another beer. You shut off the flow by placing your coaster on top of your glass when you don’t want any more beer.
We returned to the ship after lunch and took a nap, then went out exploring again. We found a section of Cologne that was like their Miracle Mile of shopping. There was every kind of store imaginable, and the streets were swarming with people in the middle of a weekday. We bought a few toiletries and food items. I hit the Internet café while Sharon returned to the Cathedral for more looking around. The ship charges 20 Euros an hour – almost $30 – for onboard wireless Internet service. But it is dirt cheap at the smoky cafes.
We walked a lot and were pretty tired by dinnertime. The dinner was German-themed because it was our last night in Germany. I had roast duck and Sharon had fish. It was all good. Then we went up on the top deck with our Table 17 group. We went dancing after that and didn’t get to sleep until almost midnight. The ship sailed at 11:30 p.m. and traveled through the night to our next stop – Holland.
OCT. 6: Arnheim, Netherlands: I woke up very early – 4:30 – and went upstairs to the lounge/coffee area. I read and dabbled with the computer for a while. I went outside and watched the sun come up and got my first glimpses of the Netherlands. It is very flat and not as picturesque as the Middle Rhine in Germany.
We had breakfast around 8 and headed out on a bus trip to the Palaise Tet Loos, a huge place built by former King of England Edward III in 1682. The place is fairly plan looking from the outside, sort of a Williamsburg look. But we were amazed when we got inside. There must be 250 rooms and the many we saw were lavishly decorated with furnishings from all over the world.
The palace was adopted by Dutch rulers after the British left it, and it seems every royal family has added to its opulence. Pouring rain dampened yet another junket, and we couldn’t finish our tour of the neatly manicured gardens because of it. Sharon and I got separated from one another at the end of the tour, and she had possession of my coat after going to retrieve it from the coat room. I was soaked before I found her.
We returned to the ship – a bus ride of about 45 minutes – and had lunch. Then we napped for most of the rest of the afternoon while some of the others went on a tour of a local World War II battlefield. The “Bridge Too Far” memorialized by a World War II movie starring Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, James Caan and others is in Arnheim and we could see it from the ship.
Sharon and I danced, attended a briefing about Amsterdam and had dinner. Then we and our group from Table 17 played The Liars Game, a ship-wide organized activity based on the dictionary definition and a game we play at home. We danced some more and went to bed.
OCT. 7: Amsterdam, Netherlands: We had breakfast and left the ship at 8:30 for a quick bus tour of Amsterdam. Then we got on a canal boat and toured the city that way. Our final stop of the morning was at the Rijksmuseum, where Rembrandt’s paintings are on display along with many others’.
It was a whirlwind morning and we loved all of it. Amsterdam is lively and totally different than anywhere else. As most people know, it’s very liberal and there is an “anything goes” attitude as exemplified by the marijuana smokers’ coffee houses, the wide-open prostitution in the Red Light District and the open public demonstrations they encourage for those who disagree with the government.
The bicyclists are everywhere. Amsterdam has 750,000 people and estimates of total bicycles ranged from 1 million to 1.5 million because some people have a weekday bike and a nicer bike for weekend jaunts.
The canals also are an important piece of both the transportation and living situation here. In addition to keeping the city from being 12 feet under water, they are lined with houseboats where many people live full-time in a city where housing is scarce and extremely expensive.
Amsterdam has 42 museums of various types, but some of them are pretty obscure. For instance, it has a Cat Museum and a Guinea Pig Museum. We also saw that someone had turned a houseboat into a place where tourists could go to see what it was like to live on the river in a houseboat. It was called The Houseboat Museum.
After the formal touring, we were on our own. It started pouring rain at noon after a very sunny morning. We ducked into a restaurant due more to the rain than the place itself. But it turned out to be great. We split a club sandwich that was one of the best we ever had, and we each had traditional Netherlands pea soup, which was also good. That came with black bread topped with raw bacon. We didn’t know what to do with that.
Then we walked for hours all over downtown, and it was packed with people – mostly young people shopping. Sharon and I bought some tulip bulbs. They have to be certified and stamped in order to be shipped to the U.S. But we found some at the Flower Mart, a big floral shop area along the canal.
We had dinner and then headed out with part of our group for the Red Light District, a risqué series of streets where porno and prostitution are wide open and legal. Our cruise director had told us the prostitutes are well organized and trained. They belong to a union and not only undergo formal prostitute training, but book-keeping classes that teach them how to keep track of all that money.
In the district, scantily clad women sit in store windows waiting to be rented. The streets were full of men and women, most of them tourists like us who were checking out the sights.
We walked back to the ship at about 10:40 and went straight to the room. All the walking had knocked us out – no dancing tonight.
OCT. 10: Amsterdam-Gouda-Schoonhoven-Rotterdam: We sailed out of Amsterdam before daylight and landed in a rural area at about 8. Sharon and I had an early breakfast and got on the bus for Gouda, located about 40 minutes from the landing spot.
Gouda is a very pretty town noted for its cheese production. On a normal day, this place probably would have been bustling with locals and tourists. But this was Sunday and it was very, very quiet. We did a walking tour of the town square and surrounding areas. For me, the greatest feature here was the old town hall, built in the early 1700s, which sits in the middle of town with lots of space around it. Today it is home to a nice restaurant, which enjoys the curved ceilings from the original building.
Some in our group were disappointed that the cheese shops were closed and this prevented them from shipping cheese wheels home. We are not Gouda cheese fans, and were content with strolling through town and having coffee on the square.
Our bus then took us to a World Heritage site that features 19 original Dutch windmills in one small area in the lowlands. Technically, all of Holland is in the lowlands and would be under water if not for very extensive drainage measures. About 300-400 years ago, windmills provided the pumping power needed to drain areas around dikes and keep farmland dry enough to harvest. We toured one of the mills in-depth, climbing to the top and seeing how people lived inside. It was fun and interesting, and the weather cooperated for once.
We returned to the ship, a trip that took us through Rotterdam and took about 45 minutes. Our local guide was repetitive and not very well-spoken, and this was irritating after a while. Viking’s on-board cruise staff is terrific. The local guides are of varying quality.
I took a nap upon our return, and Sharon walked around the town of Skoonhoven for a while. It is a silver capital, but most shops were closed. The ship headed out of port around 6:30 and we had dinner at 7. We rode through Rotterdam by river during dinner, and it was very scenic. It is the second-largest seaport in the world next to Shanghai, and you see logos for every corporation imaginable along the shore. We docked in Rotterdam for the night.
The evening was capped off by a really cute show put on by the crew. Sharon was volunteered to help, and did a great job playing a sculptor who uses humans to pose anyway she wished. When she arranged her subjects to show that they were in love, she was unaware that she would be asked to change places with one of them a few seconds later. Our friend Joe got suckered into this, too.,
We capped things off with a few dances and chatted with Bob and Judy, a fellow dancing couple from Albuquerque.
OCT. 9: Rotterdam & Delft, Holland and Antwerp, Belgium: After breakfast we got on busses at 8:30 for a trip to Delft. This is a quaint town where the Delft Blue china is made.
The trip to the china factory was not one of our more pleasant experiences. The factory was slammed with tourists from our five busses and several others, and just didn’t seem capable of handling the load. Sharon and I went straight to the gift shop to grab a few minor items, and the lines were getting bad even at that point. We tried to get a cup of coffee after that, but their coffee shop was closed. Our bus was due to leave there at 10 a.m., but ended up staying almost 30 more minutes because so many people were caught in line. The products they make are beautiful, but the ordeal wasn’t worth it.
Next stop was the town square in Delft, and this was far more enjoyable. It was a beautiful day, and we took some leisurely strolls around and had a couple of cups of coffee at sidewalk cafes. Their visitor center had free Internet access, and I checked e-mail. We left there around noon and went into Rotterdam for a bus tour of the city.
Rotterdam is the Netherlands second largest city with 600,000 people. Amsterdam, the capital, has 750,000. The Hague, the seat of government and headquarters for NATO, is nearby. Rotterdam is the engine for the Dutch economy. It is the second largest seaport in the world next to Shanghai, and we saw logos for every imaginable large corporation on buildings across the skyline and along he canals. Even the University of Phoenix has a “campus” there.
The center of Rotterdam was completely destroyed in World War II, and only the city hall and the post office remain from prior years. Everything else in this large city has been built since the War. It has some unusual modern architecture, but the modern day Rotterdam is nothing like the picturesque Amsterdam, which was mostly spared during the war.
The rest of the day was spent on the water headed toward Belgium. I napped, read and wrote this, and Sharon spent much of the afternoon on the top deck with the Table 17 gang. We had dinner with them and then she hobbled off to bed. I walked around the ship, but didn’t find much action, so I read and went to bed pretty early.
OCT 10: Brugge, Belgium: Our cruise is over, but we have one busy day to top things off. Our bus left Antwerp for Brugge at 8:30 a.m., and we spent the whole day there. Brugge, a city we visited with the girls about 10 years ago, is fabulous. It is a Gothic city that has been preserved beyond belief and is just a charming place to visit and shop.
We began with a walking tour led by our Bus #5 guide, Bernadette. She is a great guide and did a good job. We stopped in a Catholic church where sculpture was done by Michelangelo. The church was beautiful, but our stop was short.
We took lots of pictures of the scenery along the canals, and Sharon picked up a few more gift items for friends. The day started off rainy, but turned very nice just before we pulled into Brugge, which is about an hour and a half from Antwerp. It was so nice that we lamented having to go inside for a lunch planned by Viking. But we were able to open a door near our table and fresh air, coupled with good food, made lunch very enjoyable. We ate with Sid and Barbara, two very nice people we met from the Miami area.
Lunch was a typical Flemish meal of pea soup, beer-marinated beef stew, crispy French fries, homemade bread and salad. They topped it off with Belgian waffles topped with whipped cream. Everyone was impressed.
We strolled around Brugge some more after lunch, and I went to a very nice café/Internet place with wireless and great coffee. We met on the main square at 3:30 and made the long walk back to the bus, which was on the outskirts of town. They don’t let the touristy vehicles into Brugge.
We went to the captain’s toast in the lounge, then to our final supper with our new-found friends at Table 17. We plan a reunion in Pickett County, Tennessee, where Joe and Mary Ann have a place on the lake, for May. They are a great bunch of people and we look forward to that visit.
We danced a few more dances with Nickie and said our goodbyes to him, and then I went to bed. Sharon had a couple of beers with the group from our table and then she followed me.
OCT 11: Antwerp-Nashville: Our great trip comes to an end, but we get to see two of our girls again. We had a hectic, traffic-snarled trip to the Brussels airport at 7:30 a.m., but were able to secure seats with legroom, just as we did on the way over. So we lived happily ever after.
