Cruising Up the River....

Sunday morning,  December 1, 2013, finds me sitting on the Rhine River on the MS Concerto sailing up the river on my way to Basel, Switzerland.  This has been a trip three years in the making.  In the summer of 2010 I was part of a group of three couples who travelled to Germany to go to the Passion Play in Obergamerau.  After seeing the play four of us sailed on the Danube from Nurenburg to Budapest, and we fell in love with river cruising.  We then and there decided that we would all be together to sail on a Christmas Market cruise as soon as the last teacher in the group retired.  This finally happened this year, and in early January we began our preparation for this trip.

Amsterdam from the water

The cast of characters has changed.  I am now single again after the death of my spouse, and we picked up another traveller who also was left suddenly single with the death of his wife. The good thing for us is that he is a retired German teacher who spent many years teaching English to German children, and is able to assist in bargaining at the markets.

We arrived last Monday morning in Amsterdam and spend time there visiting various museums like the VanGogh and the Dutch Resistance Museum, and of course, taking a canal cruise.  We got to see lots and lots...actually hundreds, of bicycles and riders wheeling their way around town.They seem to do  much better than NYC cyclists, mainly because they ALL understand and FOLLOW the rules of the road for cyclists.




Remembrance Monument Njmegen


 

On Wednesday we boarded the ship and on Thursday morning arrived in Njmegen where we went to the National Resistance Museum  that told the story of the Dutch and their liberation by the Canadians and Americans during the end time of World War II. This museum has volunteer guides whose families had connections to the war and told personal recollections of events during that time.

 

Cologne Cathedral

Friday we were in Cologne, the place that held the largest Cathedral  for over a hundred years.  It is an impressive structure, to say the least. We had our first gluhwein here and hoped to have more as we sail up the river to Switzerland.