Tom and Susan's European vacation 2013

This is intended to be a brief journal of our 2013 European vacation.  We did a one-week cruise on the Rhine River, an extra day in Amsterdam and four days in Paris.  I will try to include some of the best pictures from every day of the trip.  Our neighbors, Ken and Deb Simkowski, were with us throughout the entire trip. 

SUNDAY:
We arrived in Zurich on Fathers' Day.  I might have slept an hour on the flight, at most.  The most memorable thing about the Zurich airport was the absolute quiet.  From lack of sleep, I might have missed the "No talking" signs walking off of the plane.

We met Susan's sister, Jo-Ellen and Jo-Ellen's daughter, Nancy.  They arrived on Saturday and looked very adjusted to their nine-hour time change.  Jo-Ellen and Nancy did the cruise with us.  

Since we had some time to kill before boarding the cruise ship, we took a tram to central Zurich and had lunch.

The highlight of lunch was the revelation that only "ladies" need to watch their waistlines in Switzerland.  Susan asked for a Diet Coke and got this Swiss equivalent...

Around 3:30, we boarded a bus for Basel.  There we boarded our cruise ship.  We did not know how lucky we were to be able to take our cruise.  The Rhine had been closed for two weeks due to flooding.  That evening we barely cleared several bridges.  The pilot house could be lowered about five feet to shrink the ship's height, but it forced the first mate to stick his head out of the moon roof.

 

Our captain piloting us through locks and under bridges

Our room was small, but the rest of the ship had plenty of space.  And because we had only 130 shipmates, we got to meet many of them.  Surprisingly, it seemed that Americans were in the minority.  It seemed that the largest group of passengers hailed from Australia and New Zealand.  Close behind were Canadians (eh?) and even a fairly large group of Japanese passengers.
  
MONDAY:
Our first stop was Strasbourg, France.  Strasbourg is part French and part German. It was my favorite city on the cruise.  It has canals linking it to the Rhine.

 

Our ship

From the center of the cathedral

TUESDAY: 

Our next day began in Speyer and ended in Heidelberg.  Speyer was smaller and very nice.  The cathedral was one of the oldest in Europe.  Construction was started nearly a thousand years ago.

View of the cathedral from the Old Gate

Susan and I also climbed up the Old Gate. I tried to translate the German signs thinking that some elevator cost one and a half euros.  We walked around a group of school children and up to the top. As we came back down, we got yelled at in German and that I understood very well.  Three euros later, we were on our way. (My German got better as the cruise went on...not so much speaking, but reading it). 

View of Speyer from Old Gate

In the afternoon, we were bused to Heidelberg to see the castle and the town.  Our guide, Bertold, bragged about often seeing Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi.  He had to mention it several times in the ride over from Speyer.  Below are pictures of the castle which is quite a hike up the hill even though the bus took us most of the way up.

View from the castle down to the Rhine

The tour of the castle took us up until about 4:00 and then we were given time to roam the town.  Since it was 97 degrees, most of us parked ourselves at a cafe and did very little roaming.  Jo-Ellen went in search for a birthday card for Susan and stumbled upon, you guessed it, Steffi Graf and her family (Andre and the two kids).  Steffi was shopping in the store where Jo-Ellen went in search for a card in German. Because of the guide's bragging about Steffi, Jo-Ellen recognized her.  She was very nice and helped her pick out a nice card. 

A view of the castle from the town

WEDNESDAY:  

This day started in Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum.  We got to see a demonstration of the printing press.  Our guide (Georg) was very good.  A large portion of Mainz was destroyed in WWII.  By comparison, most of Speyer was untouched.  The last picture below is of a Roman temple that was discovered below a mall. 

I couldn't get a picture of the cathedral from a distance

One of the side altars

 

That evening we had a tapas dinner.  It was very good.  The other pictures show the high water along the Rhine. 

THURSDAY:  

During the morning of Day Five, we did our castle tour.  The weather wasn't great, but it was tolerable.  In the afternoon, we were in Rüdesheim.  I endured 30 minutes of music cabinet museum for a taste of Rüdesheim coffee (a German version of Irish coffee).  Susan stuck it out through the entire tour, while the rest of us bailed out early despite the heat and lack of shade. 

Loreley Rock...never heard of it, but I guess that many have...

 

On to Koblenz...
Koblenz is a city at the intersection of the Rhine with the Moselle River.  Susan and Jo-Ellen did a tour of a manor house with a butterfly garden, but I had decided to see if I could rent a bike after our walking tour of Koblenz.  10 euros later I was on my way.  There were paths along both rivers. It was a bit like the Peninsula here.  Besides bikers, of which there were many, there were families with young children and many just strolling along the two rivers.  Still, I got about 90 minutes of riding in and enjoyed my time in the saddle.  It was one of my suggestions to the cruise company that they have more opportunities to ride.  Most days we had an hour or two of free time to go back and see something that the guide breezed by.  If you wanted to go back, your choice was usually to walk.  With a bike, you could have seen a bit more.  For most of the cruise, you could see a bike path along the Rhine and cyclists on it. 

A neighborhood about two miles south of the intersection of the two rivers

FRIDAY:
 On Friday we arrived in Cologne.  We were only there for about 5 hours and it was raining most of that time.  Our guide's English was not the greatest and there was a graduation mass at the cathedral.  We only got to see the back of the cathedral and the side aisles.  Cologne is a fairly large city (~750,000).  It was totally destroyed in WWII (except for the cathedral).  I wish we could have spent more time there. Susan, our neighbors and I did manage to have some time at a cafe on cathedral square. 

Eau de Cologne

Rubbing noses with this statue is supposed to bring good luck

On Friday afternoon, we left for Amsterdam.  Friday was Ken's birthday so we arranged for a some cake (and we celebrated Susan's birthday, which was the following Monday).

Happy Birthday!

It was also our farewell dinner of the cruise.

Nancy and Jo-Ellen

Ken and Deb

The whole gang with Sabin, our waiter

SATURDAY:  

On Saturday morning, after 15 hours of cruising, we docked in Amsterdam.   The first pictures are of the bicycle "problem" in Amsterdam.  The next day, the NY Times had a long article on the problem with too many bikes in Amsterdam.  Although I had seen a lot more bikes in Germany and France than are here in the US, it was hard to take a picture in Amsterdam without having a bicycle in it.  The first picture is taken near the train station.  There had to be 5,000 bikes within a quarter mile of the station.  The second picture is a bike SUV.  The center carrier is used by contractors, for carting kids or carrying groceries.  Although only about 5% of the bikes, there was a noticeable number of these multipurpose bikes.  The last picture is a typical street scene.  Notice that across the street there is also a number of bikes parked.  

The Amsterdam Train Station

Saturday morning we did the canal tour.  It took about 90 minutes.