Our vacation is over and we’ll be departing for home from Amsterdam in a couple of hours.  I must confess; it’s very much of a blur right now.  But to recap our ports, we departed Basel, Switzerland last Sunday  (7/11) with the stops in Breisach, Strasbourg, Rudesheim, Koblenz, Cologne and last but not least, Amsterdam.    Side trips took us  to Colmar and the Alsatian Wind Road (Breisach), Heidelberg castle and city(Speyer), and Marksburg castle (Koblenz).

With the factual stuff out of the way, what were the highlights? First on the list was having dinner and attending a magnificent concert with our friends in Rudesheim.  I got to meet the rest of Andreas’ family and was proud to introduce mine to him.  Other memorable events were spending an enjoyable evening in a Koblenz beer garden with new friends from the boat, the unbelievable gothic cathedral of Cologne of course, a similarly magnificent but much smaller gothic cathedral in Strasbourg, the Alsace village of Colmar and a first hand introduction to Alsatian wines, Marksburg castle,  the university in Heidelberg, and the castles along the Rhein to name the first few that come to mind. 

Basal memories include the expensive meals (breakfasts was $100 for three), the cathedrals and art museum, sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying fondue and walking back to the hotel in the rain, and getting lost on the way to the boat.

My original intention was to publish a post on the blog every day.  But although the boat was advertised as having WIFI, it was spotty and when we did have it, there wasn’t enough bandwidth to upload photographs.  And besides, the days were so busy that there wasn’t much energy left at the end to upload photographs, work on them, write a blog and publish it.  I was able to get quite a few images on Flickr.  There are still more to publish so you might want to check back in a few days.

The WIFI situation not withstanding, there are a lot of great things to say about Uniworld, our  cruise line, and the experience they provided for us.  We loved the staff, the boat and the guests. Because of the size of the boat and the small number of guests the entire cruise had an intimate, friendly and warm feeling.  We’re already talking about which Uniworld cruise we’ll take next.

Well, it’s time to pack up and head off to the airport.  See you back in the states.