Back from Europe

I wish I could have posted before now, but we were so busy on the cruise and the internet connectivity was so slow that it was just too difficult to do much. We had a great trip. Viking is the only way to go for river cruises. We had one slight blip--the water in the Main Danube canal was too low to let our ship pass, so we had to bus from Nuremberg to Passau. Fortunately, the sister ship of the one we were on was on the other side of the bottleneck, so we just swapped ships. It turned out to be only a minor inconvenience.

The cities Viking chose to visit were all very interesting. I'm sure there are a lot more, but we were happy with the ones we visited. We saw some amazing things, but after a while it all sort of runs together. Here are some selected photos of the things we saw.

August 26 Cologne.

August 27 The Middle Rhine and Marksburg Castle

August 28 Miltenberg

Jewish Cemetery

August 29 Wurzburg and Rothenburg

August 30 Bamburg

August 31 Nuremberg

September 1 Regensburg

September 2 Passau (now on the Danube)

potter at work

1493

September 3 "The Wachau" Krems and the Melk Abbey

September 4 Vienna

Mozart

inside a Greek Orthodox church

interesting clock

September 5 Bratislava

September 6 Budapest

parliament at night

black plague memorial

St Stephen

We got to tour the galley in our boat.

wurst cooking

schnitzel cooking

 Our Chef

 

Our waiter Tijomer taking a selfie with us in the background.

Windmills

We made a side trip today to visit a UNESCO site in Holland. We got a guided tour of a set of windmills, some of which have been working since the 15th century. We got to go inside and see the actual workings. No photos of the inside, but here are some landscapes.


























A windmill in action.

And the modern version of a windmill--an Archimedes screw.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Kinderhijk

Three Days in Amsterdam

We are now nearing the end of our third day in Amsterdam. It's a nice city, but in August it's pretty crowded. Right now Sail Amsterdam is going on--a visit from tall ships from all over. In addition to tourists, everyone here owns two bicycles. It's a challenge to keep from getting run over. Traffic laws apparently don't apply to bicycles. Although there are bike lanes, they ride them on the sidewalks as well.

We had a nice tour our first day, taking in a lot of the historical sights. Since then we've been on our own. Yesterday we went to the Rembrandt Museum, mainly to see the Night Watch and some ver Meers. The former is very impressive, but the museum didn't have as many ver Meers as we expected. Frankly, the museum was kind of disappointing.

We tried to get into the van Gogh museum, but the line was unacceptably long. We bought ticket tickets online for today instead. That's the way to go--you pick a time and get to go in via a special line. The van Gogh museum was very impressive. It's maybe the best organized museum I've ever visited. We really enjoyed it.

We've done a lot of walking--7.5 miles both of the first two days. But today we used the tram a lot. It's very easy to use and one-on-one and two-day passes are a real bargain.

Here are a few photos.


























- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Test blog

Puppy pictures













- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Western Journey continued III

Visalia is very close to Sequoia NP, which was our next destination. We spent a good part of the day driving through the park and looking at big trees. We took a hike down to the General Sherman tree. Sequoias are weird trees. General Sherman is dead at the top, but keeps on growing around. According to the park, the General adds the equivalent of a whole tree every year. I wondered--what kind and size of tree, but there was no one to ask. Afterwards we drove to Yosemite and toured from the south entrance to the valley. We spent the night at an inferior lodge associated with the NP. Worst room of our trip.













- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad