Rhine Cruise: Amsterdam

Rhine Cruise: Amsterdam

Our Rhine cruise ended at Amsterdam, Netherlands, where we stayed for two days since we wanted to see Amsterdam before our additional extended Germany Trip from Munich to Berlin.

On the first day, we took a hop-on hop-off canal bus as an easy way for sightseeing to get familiar with the city and reduce our walking somewhat. We visited the RijksMuseum which focuses on the paintings of Rembrandt and the Dutch Masters. We had lunch at a sidewalk cafe. The weather was cool and overcast with light rain in the morning, but cleared up nicely for the afternoon.

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There are bikes everywhere! You really have to watch where you walk with them whizzing around; we even saw a 3-level parking garage for bikes near center city which was totally packed.

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On the second day, it was a lovely sunny day in upper 50’s. We rode the canal bus in the morning to see some more of the city since there are so many canals and our 24-hour ticket expired at noon. We had lunch at another nice outdoor cafe, and visited the Van Gogh Museum. We did a lot of walking, and it was interesting to see everything at night.

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Click on the following photo to view the Amsterdam photo gallery (about 96 photos) at my SmugMug photo web site.

Rhine Cruise: Amsterdam

The automatic slideshow displays each photo for 2 seconds with a 1 second fade transition. There are options for full-screen mode in the lower-right corner, and a pause button in the lower-left corner. There are also arrows on the left and right sides to move manually forward and backward through the photos.

Rhine Cruise: Kinderdijk

Rhine Cruise: Kinderdijk

Today on our Viking river cruise, we visited the windmills in the village of Kinderdijk, Netherlands. It’s pronounced “Kinderdike” with a long “i” and silent “j”. They were actually more interesting that I expected. We had a tour which explained the history of the windmills and we went inside one of the windmills. It was located in South Holland below Amsterdam and east of Rotterdam which is the largest port in Europe so we saw quite a few barges, ships, and tug boats in that area where several rivers come together. In the evening on our way north to Amsterdam, we had to go through some locks, which was interesting at night.

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Click on the following Windmill photo to view the Kinderdijk photo gallery (about 16 photos) at my SmugMug photo web site.

Rhine Cruise: Kinderdijk

The automatic slideshow displays each photo for 2 seconds with a 1 second fade transition. There are options for full-screen mode in the lower-right corner, and a pause button in the lower-left corner. There are also arrows on the left and right sides to move manually forward and backward through the photos.

Rhine Cruise

Rhine Cruise

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.

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