Viking River Cruise

Budapest to Amsterdam with 3 day pre-trip to Prague and 5 day post in Amsterdam on a house boat.

We are in Amsterdam now on the houseboat.  During our River cruise we had Flat Stanley with us.  Jason, our great nephew read the book in school and asked us to take his Flat Stanley on our trip.  The story is that FS is flattened by a bulletin board.  His family decides that now he can travel by mail and visit relatives in all parts of the country.  In our case Flat Stanley traveled to parts of the world.  We sent stories and pictures to Jason from Flat Stanley and so now are copying those here as our Prague and Viking River Cruise--Budapest to Amsterdam entries.  We may add some more info or detail during our days in Amsterdam prior to the trip to Croatia but this will get you started.  Flat Stanley is returning to West Chester PA this week.

Jason—We are having a good time on our trip.   We spent three days in Prague in the Czech Republic.  We had fun in the airport  with the art and the advertisements.  Everyone liked the idea of traveling in a small car, though we ended up in a bus instead.

  We got to see lots of different things since we were in the city for so long.  Near the town square they have an astronomical clock which has a show each hour,  the figures on the front move and doors open on top showing figures moving behind the doors.  Nearby there was a door that was more my size then most of the other doors we have seen.    

 At night, Nancy, Sue and   I walked around town before going to a Marionette show.  I am posing with some of the puppets in the lobby.  The show was called the Magic Flute.  

The next day we took a tour to a small town called Kutna Hora. There we went to St Barbara Church and walked along an avenue lined with sculptures.  The town was originally known for its silver mines and minting of coins.  The fountain shows one of the miners carrying materials on his head.  

The Czech Republic also has a LEGO factory and this sculpture was outside  one of the stores.  We were very surprised to  find out about the factory and later we happened to drive by it on our way back to Prague.  In the afternoon we went to find the Harley  Davidson store to buy Sue’s brother a t-shirt.  Nancy and Sue try to buy him one where ever they go in the world.  Nancy and I posed with one of the old motorcycles they had on display.

Next stop, after an 8 hour bus ride, Budapest, Hungary.  This is where we got on the ship.  The next day we went to the part of town high on the hill overlooking the city, we walked around the part of town with its  highlight being another cathedral.  Early the next day when we left the city to travel along the Danube River we came to a lock.  It is one of the tallest in Europe and is able to raise and lower the ships up to 60 feet.  We were in the lock with 3 other ships, there are two behind me in the picture.

And so our river  adventure  began, our first stop was Bratislava the capital of Slovakia.  We visited the Bratislava castle, saw a fun poster on a souvenir shop in town and posed with statues of a Napoleon soldier and of a man coming out of a man-hole cover in the road. 

After Bratislava, Slovakia, we moved to Austria. Our first stop was Vienna. We went first to the Imperial palace. Then we walked around town and saw this intricate statue and a roller coaster built in 1897, 212 feet tall that takes 20 minutes to go around once. We also saw the Lippizaner Stallions, a special Viennese horse that is well trained for performing/dancing in horse shows. We visited St Stephen’s Cathedral which was beautiful, then we stopped at a Starbuck’s Coffee Shop, they have Starbuck’s in many countries around the world. In the afternoon we went to the summer palace of Arch Duchess of Austria, Maria Theresa who ruled from 1740-1780. She had 16 children. After visiting her summer home we stopped in the cafe and enjoyed apple strudel. It was delicious.
In the evening we want to a concert of Mozart and Strauss music. These are two famous musicians who lived and worked in Vienna. We heard a violin that was made in 1726 almost 300 years old. The concert was held in a beautiful hall. There were cellists, violinists, a piano player, an oboe, flute, clarinet and bassoon player. We had a fun evening and even sang along as the conductor invited the audience to join in. 

Melk Austria is the next stop. Along the way we have gone through many locks to raise us up to the next level of the river. We enter in the low side and water rushes in to raise our boat up the point at which we can continue out onto the river. It can take five to twenty minutes depending on how many other ships have to enter the lock or how high we need to go. 

In Melk we went to a hilltop Abbey where there are 30 monks who work and teach school. We did not see the Monks but we did see the children getting out of school—just like kids everywhere. We visited the museum of the history of the Abbey which included art work and ended in the library which holds 8500 mostly leather bound books.They covered history, science, nature, philosophy and religion. Quite impressive. The pictures are of the Abbey courtyard, a model of the Abbey and the view from an upper courtyard of the Austrian countryside, as you can see it is a quite a large building and compound. 

After Austria we followed the river to Germany. We begin in the Bavarian part of the country. Our first town was Passau. A very old town being formed in 100AD, almost 2000 years ago. It is a quaint town that we enjoyed walking through. Town is built on a peninsula between the Inn and the Danube rivers with another third river, the Ilz, also joining the larger rivers near the peninsula point. The first picture is along the Inn river showing a turret. The light brown at the bottom shows where the water level was during a recent flood. The town is still rebuilding and trying to preserve its old buildings. 

In the cathedral in town we went to an organ concert. The organ, the largest in the world, has 17,774 pipes, 250 stops and six consoles, places from which you can play it. Above town there is a fortress. It is shown here with our ship in Danube where we were docked near town. The next town was Regensberg, a medieval city.  The fun fact here was that the wall I am standing in front of was built in 179 AD. It boosts Germany’s oldest bridge built in 1135-1146 which knights used to cross the Danube. Also here is Germany’s oldest restaurant—800 years. 

We are enjoying the small villages of Germany. Many have old homes and places date back to 1400 and 1500’s. They have a certain style called half-timber. In Bamberg, the half timber building is the town hall and it is built on the bridge over the river in the center of town. The church did not want to give land to the town for the town hall, so the people built it just outside of the city limits. It is a beautiful building with murals on one whole side of the building.

The shop sold typical german style figurines. The bakers are a part of the culture as well—bakeries and sweets everywhere we went. Sue and I enjoyed an ice cream sundae at an outdoor cafe. The sundae was called a zebra sundae. Vanilla and chocolate ice cream and chocolate sauce layers with cookies. Hmmm, Hmmmm, good.

One day we took a long bus ride to visit Rothenberg au der Tauber—it means above the Tauber River. It was built on a hill so is not subject to flooding and many of its old buildings, from 1170, remain intact. The castle was gone since it fell during an earthquake a long time ago but the tower and wall around town still remain. They have the same half-timber homes and lots of Christmas shops, Nutcracker shops and Teddy bear shops. Germany is home to a special type of teddy bear—Steiff which was first made in 1880 and is known around the world. Nancy and I had fun posing....










In Wertheim founded in 779, I found this advertising for kids books. We walked around the medieval town and saw many sites including its own leaning tower. The flood waters of the Main and Tauber rivers have caused the tower to lean.  The castle on the hill outside of town is only a shell but still stands over the town as a reminder of its history.

  

The Marksburg Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site which means it continues to be preserved. It was originally used for protection for the city below. It was built in 1100 and is the only castle on the Rhine River not destroyed by war or weather. We rode buses up a windy road and then walked the rest of the way up the steep hill. We entered through a narrow door and the gates of the castle were locked behind us. Our favorite room was the one filled with armor, some ceremonial, of the various knights throughout the history of the castle. I tried on a breast plate, but otherwise just posed with the knights. 

Our trip is winding down. We were tired in Cologne in the morning so stayed aboard and then went out to meet our friends Christian and Ingrid. They live an hour north of here and drove down to see us. Nancy and Sue met them on a trip to Egypt and stayed in touch via facebook. We enjoyed strolling around town, visiting the large and beautiful cathedral and visiting over lunch.


After a quiet day on board we set sail for the Netherlands and Kinderdijk to see windmills!! What fun. They are part of the water management system and pump water from one canal to another so that it can eventually run off to the river and avoid flooding. We walked out to a windmill and got to climb inside to see where the gears work to pump the water and where the mill tender and his family live. On the way in there was a pair of wooden shoes so I tried them on, a bit big....




And so after 5 countries, 8 rivers, 2 canals, 4 capitals, 68 locks and 285 bridges we arrived today in Amsterdam. We are staying on a houseboat. What fun to be staying on one of the canals that run throughout this water town. Tomorrow we will send our last pictures of the boat and the neighborhood. 

 Last day of my trip. A day roaming around in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. We headed out to the Harley Davidson Store for another t-shirt and found lots of interesting sites along the way. First a picture of our houseboat from across the canal. There are canals everywhere and more bicycles then people. It is quite an adventure to walk from here to there between bikes and over bridges. There are bike lanes, car lanes and sidewalks for the people. Bikes seem to have the right of way. 

We walked past the Anne Frank House. She wrote a diary as a young girl during World War II and people line up to see where she lived. We went to the Harley Store and then tried to eat at the Upstairs Pannenkoeken house but needed a reservation so ate at a corner cafe and had apple pannenkoeken anyway. Yum. We found several art markets since it is Sunday and walked past some sculptures in Rembrandt park—I posed with a few. Rembrandt, the great painter, was born here. 



The houses here are all tall and narrow. We passed this one built in 1720 and some built even earlier. They have tall windows, sometimes with arches and many have outdoor shutters. There is definitely an Amsterdam style. 









We have had a great trip, I am a bit tired after walking an average of 4 miles per day and now I head home to West Chester PA. Good bye or as they say here, vaarwel. Flat Stanley, world adventurer.