My friend Clare and I joined the Romance on the Rhine Quilting Tour last month, it was run by Travelrite. It was very well organised and the celebrity host was Michelle Marvig, who has been travelling the world doing tours for years.
It was an 8 night cruise along the mid Rhine River in Germany on the A Rosa Brava. We had upgraded to a Juliette Balcony, which meant we had a double door that opened onto the water.
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| A Rosa Brava Room |
It was a lovely cruise and the food was wonderful. We were the first Australians that the cruise had ever hosted and they seemed to enjoy our enthusiasm. It might have been a bit of a shock to the mainly German passengers to have 35 Australian quilters on board.
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| A Rosa Brava |
Our first stop was Rudesheim, we were taken on a tour through the beautiful city. We came across the oldest house that had luckily been spared any bomb damage during the war, it is from 1500! The stories that house could tell. It's a shame that the red van was parked in front of it.
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| Rudesheim House |
One of our many activities was to go to Siegfried's Mechanical Musical Cabinet where we were treated a concert by the many restored and fully working, huge music boxes.
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| Siegfried's Mechanical Musical Cabinet. |
The next day we arrived at Nierstein, which was a lovely gentle, small village.
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| Nierstein |
We walked around town, exploring the church and streets, stopped at a cafe for morning tea and then spent the afternoon on the boat doing our hexagon project. Michelle Marvig had supplied us all with a kit to make a table runner with pink hexagons and a lovely bird fabric for the centre. Food and drinks were all supplied on board so we had to keep the waiters busy serving us with a cocktail!
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| Sewing hexagons |
The following day we went to Strasbourg, the weather was perfect and I thought Strasbourg was very beautiful, just like a postcard.
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| Strasbourg |
We walked around town and found the Notre Dame Cathedral, which is the same design as the one in Paris.
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Strasbourg Notre Dame Cathedral
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It was the first time I had seen a European Cathedral and I was very impressed.
We also visited the Decorative Arts Museum and saw so many beautiful things. Here is an amazing clock.
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| Clock in the Decorative Arts Museum, Strasbourg |
The following Day we went to Mainz. We saw a beautiful Boroque Church and learnt all about Gutenburg who invented the printing press and then we went to St Stephen's Church which had windows designed by the artist Marc Chagall.
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| Marc Chagall's Church windows |
Clare and I tried selfies every so often but we weren't very good at it!
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| Gutenberg Statue |
We didn't set sail that night because they wanted us to sail during the day so we could see the beautiful UNESCO Heritage listed middle section of the Rhine. We sailed past so many beautiful houses, castles and vineyards.
Look at the photo below and see the vineyards on the side of the hill, I don't know how they tend them without rolling downwards.
We sailed past the famous Loreley Rock, where legends said the siren Loreley lured the sailors to their death in a very narrow section of the Rhine.
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| Loreley Rock |
The ship played the Loreley music and Hans our entertainment guy sang the Loreley song as we sailed past. Here is the Loreley statue.
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| Loreley Statue |
That afternoon, we stopped at Koblenz and had another walking tour through the town. Their emblem is the spitting boy fountain, every so often he spits out water and tourists get wet, which they think is very funny.
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| Spitting Boy Statue |
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| Koblenz Square |
We stopped at Bonn for our last full day on the cruise. Bonn used to be the capital city of Germany before the wall came down, after that Berlin became the capital. Bonn, is lovely with a huge university. I really loved Bonn because we went to the house where Beethoven was born. It felt very special to be there and walk around the house which was set up as a museum to Beethoven with lots of info about him. He lived there until he was 22 and then he went to Vienna for a job with the orchestra.
I didn't get a good photo of the front of Beethoven's house, I only took one of the back of the house.
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| Beethoven Birth place |
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| Beautiful Bonn |
I loved seeing a book that Beethoven actually composed in, especially those crossings out, an example of an artist at work.
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| Beethoven's music book |
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| Me with Beethoven Statue in the garden |
Across the road from Beethoven's house was a large gift shop dedicated to Beethoven. I bought a couple of scarves with music notes on them, chocolate, a little music box that plays Song of Joy (Beethoven's 9th Symphony), a pen and eraser. I didn't have much spare space in my suitcase for many purchases.
Feeling a little sad that our cruise was finishing, we said good bye to the ship and a bus drove us to Frankfurt. We were catching a plane from Frankfurt airport because we were going to spend four days in Denmark.
Our plane didn't leave until late in the afternoon and so we could spend the day looking around. It was a Sunday and all the shops in Europe close on Sundays so they can spend time with their families. We didn't know how we were going to spend the day with the shops closed. Luckily, the old town tourist area was open, so we could look at Souvenir shops, have morning tea and lunch and an ice-cream because it was quite warm.
Frankfurt was another gorgeous town, I suppose the locals just take those picturesque old buildings for granted.
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| Frankfurt, Germany |
Although we were sad to leave Europe, we knew our holiday was not over because we were off to Denmark for another adventure.
What I loved about Europe was the beautiful, fairytale like architecture, their delicious melt in the mouth pastries and their lovely shops, where I could have spent a fortune, if I had space in my suitcase.
It was interesting to learn about how the World Wars affected their towns and how many times the French and Germans have been at odds with each other. It was also interesting to learn that most of their towns are built on top of Roman Ruins, we saw lots of Roman ruins on our tours.
Whenever they decide to upgrade a building or decide to pull one down to build a bigger more useable one, the archeologists move in to research the Roman Ruins and remove the artifacts for museums.
One building site was told the archeologists would take 6 months but 8 years later, it was still a building site!
I will talk about the rest of my trip in another post.
Bye for now,
Linda
