Year: 2023

Our boat docked at Mannheim. We were bused from there to Heidelberg. A bit about this city:

“Heidelberg (German: is a city in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914, of which roughly a quarter consisted of students.[3]

Located about 78 km (48 mi) south of Frankfurt, Heidelberg is the fifth-largest city in Baden-Württemberg. Heidelberg is part of the densely populated Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region.

Heidelberg University, founded in 1386, is Germany’s oldest and one of Europe’s most reputable universities.[4] Heidelberg is a scientific hub in Germany and home to several internationally renowned research facilities adjacent to its university, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and four Max Planck Institutes.[5] The city has also been a hub for the arts, especially literature, throughout the centuries, and it was designated a “City of Literature” by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.”

Our tour guide hit us at our first stop with his opening installment of German Royals history. It was cold and windy. The group shifted uncomfortable. A five minute walk to another stop, we paused for our 2nd installment of what was, to my dismay, another deep dive. Fifteen minutes of droning later, Eileen and I were two blocks away and moving fast. Most of our group were close on our heels. I suspect that by the 3rd stop, he was pontificating to empty air.

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A short visit to this town, known for it’s natural hot springs. Our group didn’t have time to actually get into the water. (Plus, it never occurred to me to bring my swim suit). It’s also known for its casino(s).

(From wiki:) “In 2021, the town became part of the transnational UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name “Great Spa Towns of Europe”, because of its famous spas and architecture that exemplifies the popularity of spa towns in Europe in the 18th through 20th centuries.

The springs at Baden-Baden were known to the Romans as Aquae (“The Waters”) and Aurelia Aquensis (“Aurelia-of-the-Waters”) after M. Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus.”
In modern German, Baden is a noun meaning “bathing” but Baden, the original name of the town, derives from an earlier plural form of Bad (“bath”). (Modern German uses the plural form Bäder.) As with the English placename “Bath”, other Badens are at hot springs throughout Central Europe. The current doubled name arose to distinguish it from the others, particularly Baden near Vienna in Austria and Baden near Zürich in Switzerland.”

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Our first tour after embarking. Strasbourg, which is actually in France, is big. Our date of arrival was auspicious, being Unification Day in Germany (the fall of East Germany and the Berlin wall, the end of the cold war), a major holiday. We were warned. It was really crowded. Half of Germany seemed to have come over the border to visit.

Strasbourg sits right on the Rhine. Over the centuries, it went back and forth, back and forth from being first in “France”, then in “Germany”.

“In 2020, the city proper had 290,576 inhabitants and both the Eurométropole de Strasbourg (Greater Strasbourg) and the Arrondissement of Strasbourg had 511,552 inhabitants.[8] Strasbourg’s metropolitan area had a population of 853,110 in 2019,[4] making it the eighth-largest metro area in France and home to 14% of the Grand Est region’s inhabitants. The transnational Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau had a population of roughly 1,000,000 in 2022. Strasbourg is one of the de facto four main capitals of the European Union (alongside Brussels, Luxembourg and Frankfurt), as it is the seat of several European institutions, such as the European Parliament, the Eurocorps and the European Ombudsman of the European Union.”

We all got bused over from the boat. Our tour guide, a young female, tormented us on the bus with impossible to understand trivia, delivered at crushing volume. Her inanity continued once in town. I didn’t wear an earpiece, so I just tagged along, taking pictures. The Old Town offered up the same kind of old architecture and ambience as Zurich and Basel. The main attraction was Cathédral Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, a very old church of enormous proportion. So large it was hard to take a picture of it.

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The river cruise from Basel to Amsterdam: a new experience for Tim and Eileen. Fairly swank, 5 star food and service.

The boat – a prototypical Rhine River cruiser. There are many outfits plying the river, but all use the exact same boat, probably made in the same ship yard. The Rhine has a lot of locks. These boats (and every boat) have to fit inside a lock.

135m long, fairly narrow. Rooms on three levels. We were in “steerage” on the bottom. Room very tight, but functional. Level two held the lobby and the formal dining room. Level three held the bar, informal dining, and general hanging out. Level 3 also had the beloved Coffee Bar machine, a beast that ground fresh coffee and could make six different types: espresso, latte, Americano, chocolate, etc. We preferred this machine to the coffee served at table for breakfast.

The bar was “open”. No limits. We heard many a champagne bottle pop – for breakfast! The breakfast buffet was stunning. Over 30 different things to choose from. Custom omelettes. Lunch could either be semi-formal in the dining room, or a buffet at the bar. A person could stay drunk all day and eat nothing but fancy desserts if they wanted to debauch. In the wrong crowd, this could have gone wrong, but the average age was 72, and half the passengers were Canadians. There were no fist fights. Dinners were semi-formal and the food was outstanding.

We often formed up with a few couples that we sought out, but we also sat with complete strangers. Everyone was friendly, considerate, interesting. The crew was relentlessly cheerful and helpful. There were no native English speakers on the crew, from the lowest room cleaners to the boat manager and captain. I’m not even sure that any of them were from central Europe. Indonesia, the Baltics for sure. But everyone could communicate well enough.

The boat often cruised at night so that we’d be in port for daily outings. There were two, sometimes three options. Still, we often cruised at least part of the day as well, the boat going along down stream at ~11mph. There was something addicting about watching the scenery drift by.

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A local tram in Zurich to the transit center, an inner city train (located the right gate with great difficulty) to Basel, and we were there. Our next AirBnb was actually close enough to walk to, but we got a hard lesson in making Google Maps work for pedestrians in a dense urban environment. A 15 minute walk turned into a 45 minute slog in hot weather.

Per Zurich, the density of bikes near the train hub was boggling. Housing is uniformly dense. Block after block of 4-6 story high buildings, all but the 1st floor housing. Every block looks the same. It’s hard to know where true north is. We made enough mistakes walking the wrong way to realize we needed to get our compass out and orient our phones before we started “following the blue dot”.

This Airbnb gave us our first clue as to why every single block has a hundred bikes parked outside. We had to navigate up 3 floors of a circular staircase, with suitcases. A big difference between European stairs and American stairs. Euro stairs are STEEP. Halfway to ladder steep. And the tread is tiny. Circular stairs are worse. The widest part is not as wide as my foot is long. The narrow part is down to an inch or two. There’s no way a person could bring a bike up and down such. So outside the bikes live, 365 days a year. And virtually everyone has a bike, what with the bike paths being so pervasive and spectacularly designed.

Bike paths are literally everywhere. Some share roads, with a painted lane, but most are separated from cars. Bike lanes are red. Pedestrian sidewalks are not and the twain seldom meet. Bikes have total right of way on the red.

We really liked the feel of Basel, altho it wasn’t as spotless as Zurich. (Nothing could possibly be as spotless as Zurich). Day one we walked a mile to the Basel’s Old Town for a guided walking tour. Day two we rented e-bikes (20 EU for the day), pedaled across the Rhine and then up and down, both directions, including to where our river cruise boat was due to dock.

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