Recently, we enjoyed the Rhine Getaway with Viking River Cruises. It was an 8-day cruise along the Rhine river in Germany, which includes Basel (Switzerland), Breisach (Black Forest), Strasbourg (France), Heidelberg & Rüdesheim, Middle Rhine (Castles) and Koblenz, Cologne, Kinderdijk and Amsterdam (Netherlands). This travel post kicks off a series about the cruise featuring my photos for each destination.

For another two weeks after the cruise, we extended our trip through Germany where we spent several days each visiting Amsterdam, Munich & Bavaria (Royal Castles), Salzburg (Austria), Romantic Road (Nördlingen, Dinkelsbühl, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber), Leipzig (wife’s grandmother birthplace), and Berlin (nephew and family). I will also continue the travel photo posts for our Germany Trip.

I wrote a poem as a limerick with alliteration about our journey for the Poetry 201 workshop in February when we were planning our trip:

Germany is a journey to enjoy that I would choose.
Flying overnight to Europe offers time for a snooze.
Oh, I am so excited …
so much fun …
now that we’re both booked aboard a Viking River Cruise!

It was a wonderful three weeks, with lots of opportunities for photos and travel blog posts. I took almost 4,000 photos, but have filtered that down to about 1,000 so far. Also, I established a photo web site to store, organize, and view my photos. It has taken me longer than expected to get it together, but now I think it’s ready.

Although I will continue working on further refinement, I didn’t want to delay my posts any longer. For example, I probably need to reduce the number of photos in the homepage slideshow, and maybe even the destination highlights too. Any suggestions for improvement are welcome and certainly appreciated.

Also, I thought it might be interesting to provide some additional information from the Viking web site for additional background on our cruise about the itinerary, longship, and experience.

Links

These links provide an overview of our itinerary and ship.

• Rhine Getaway – Itinerary from Basel to Amsterdam
• Longship Kvasir – Overview of our Viking cruise ship

Videos

Here are some brief highlights of the Rhine cruise from Amsterdam to Basel (reverse direction).

“Rhine Getaway” on Viking River Cruises – 45 sec

This provides a tour of a Viking Longship and the experience:

“Viking Longship Tour” on Viking River Cruises – 2 min 44 sec

This offers brief general highlights of Viking cruises:

“The World of Viking 2015” on Viking River Cruises – 1 min 32 sec