Regensburg, Germany - May 20, 2024

It was a restful morning on the ship as we weren’t getting into port until noon.  The weather is fantastic, sunny and in the mid-seventies.  This video, if it posts, shows a little of the town from the stone bridge.

They gave a disembarkation talk in the lounge where they explained what would happen on Wednesday when we leave the ship.  We, and a lot of other people, will be going onto Prague for a few days.  Actually, the full tour is three nights but we’ll only be there for two before we move onto Amsterdam.

There were no big surprises in the talk but they do work gratuities differently then ocean cruises.  On ocean trips the gratuities are automatically charged to your account each day unless you ask to have them removed.  On a river cruise they have suggested tipping guidelines and it’s up to you to pay by credit card or cash on the last day.

Their guidelines suggest 100 euros per passenger for the crew.  Another 25 euro per guest for the cruise manager (who has been with us since before the ship left for Budapest and will be with us until we leave Prague) plus another 4 euro per person per day for the land portion.  For Fred and I the total suggested tip would come to 282 euro for the two of us.  

282 Euro is about $306 or close to it.  We have $300 in on board credit but we’ve also sent laundry in to be done.  We should get our credit statement sometime tonight and we’ll see what we’ll do.  

So, business aside we were in beautiful Regensburg, a UNESCO World Heritage site.  It’s a typical picturesque German town.  We took a walking tour and learned about the history and the formation of the town.  On the outskirts, just before we got to town we got a view of Valhalla, a museum dedicated to distinguished people throughout Germany's history.

The town is very pretty and we enjoyed walking around.  Again, we had an excellent guide, she was a very good communicator, we even walked by the house she lives in.  Below are some pictures we took along the way today, including the oldest sausage retailer in Germany.  I didn’t take a picture of the line of people waiting to get a sausage but there were quite a few. Here are some other pictures we took around town.

Regensburg was not bombed during the war although the Nazi’s tried to destroy the stone bridge to stymie the allied advance.  We’re heard this in other towns as well, the allies didn’t cause the damage, the Nazi’s did while retreating.  The stone bridge was damaged but did not fall down.

After our tour we walked around town for a while.  Most stores are closed but the tourist merchants, restaurants and ice cream sellers were all open.  Today is Pentecost Monday, and like yesterday is a holiday.  

Tomorrow we will be in Nuremberg, Germany.  Instead of the standard walking tour we chose one that looks at Nuremberg’s history in WWII.

Passau, Germany - May 19, 2024

It’s a beautiful day, sunny and warm as we start the day while still in Austria.  Later we’ll be in Germany for today’s tour.

We stopped about 8AM to drop off those people going to Salzburg for the day.  It must have been a large group because it was pretty quiet on the ship after they left.  They will later join us in Passau.

Fred has a bad cold and slept in.  I brought him cereal and coffee while I had a quick breakfast in the lounge where they serve ‘bistro breakfast’.  This is just some of the stuff from the main restaurant menu served buffet style.

There wasn’t much to do in the morning other than enjoy the view.  There are so many river cruise boats going by all the time, cruise lines we’ve never heard of.  We assume most of these cater to the European market.  

In case you heard about a collision between a river cruise boat and a small pleasure craft…it wasn’t us.  The accident happened behind us on the river.  The smaller craft got the worse of it of course, two dead and three missing.  Apparently, the river boat, called the Heidelberg, just kept going though all the details aren’t out yet.  From what we’ve seen the smaller boats don’t adhere to the normal passing rules for boating so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it was the small boat’s fault but still the river boat should have stopped.

Fred decided he was just too wiped out by the cold to go on the excursion in Passau today.  After lunch he went back to sleep and I went on the tour.

Passau was largely untouched during WWII, only their train station was bombed so they look pretty much the same as they ever did.  As we saw in Durnstein, flooding is a major problem.  Here are the water levels marked on the town hall’s wall.  It’s hard to believe water got up that high.  They had a ‘100 year’ flood in 2002 and just 11 years later…you guessed it another ‘100 year’ flood, this one even worse in 2013.

The town is very picturesque, with a fortress, which is now a youth hostel.

There town hall has a beer garden in front of it and it’s right across the street from the water front.  

Across the river are rows of houses.

Another claim to fame is a Glass Museum, housed in the same building as a hotel.  The museum has some very old items in it but the claim to fame is that Neil Armstrong actually did the dedication opening it.  There's a picture to prove it.  The owner of the hotel somehow knew him and asked him to come for the ribbon cutting - and he came!  Kind of out of character for someone who led a very quiet life after the moon landing.  The hotel is right by the town hall and very pretty.

Passau is actually the meeting place of three rivers, the (blue) Danube, the (black) Ilz and the (green) Inn.  The Danube is not blue despite the song, the Ilz may appear to be black and the Inn did look a little greenish. 

They of course have a large cathedral, St Stephen.  Even though it’s Sunday we came by late enough in the day so we could go in and look around.  Most of the buildings are in the Baroque style but after the war they didn’t have the money to use gold in the restoration of the church so they used more silver.  It looks very nice.  Restorations to the interior of the church are paid for by the church, but the outside is paid for by the government.

We got off the ship about a half-hour drive from Passau and came into town by bus.  The ship followed later and came into town about 6PM.  It was ‘double parked’ next to another river boat and you couldn’t see it.  Lucky for me I recognized some of the other passengers and they knew where the ship was but only because they asked.  When I got back on, Fred was feeling better having had a good day’s rest.

He really didn’t want to go to dinner and risk coughing on other people so I asked if we could have dinner in our room – they ordinarily do not do room service on river cruises.  The food was delivered after 7:30 and was very good.  In fact, almost all the food on board has been good. 

Tomorrow, we have a relaxing morning and then we’re in Regensburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for the afternoon.

Durnstein and Melk Austria - May 18, 2024

Today we had two stops in Austria.  That’s Austria the country near Germany of course. There were tee shirts and hats all over Vienna yesterday that said, NO KANGAROOS in AUSTRIA.  They had an outline of a kangaroo with a big slash (for no) across it.  Apparently, people get confused.

Anyway, we saw two of the prettiest little towns today along the Danube.  One of the things that has struck us, and others on board, is the lack of development along this river.  Occasionally we’ll see a house or a small village but that’s it. 

Durnstein was our first stop.  It’s a lovely medieval town untouched for the most part for centuries.  Only 800 people live in the greater Durnstein area.  There are a lot of wineries in this valley and our tour today included a wine tasting that everyone seemed to enjoy.

They are also famous for their apricots.  There was apricot everything you could think of being sold all over town today.  Apricots with alcohol from the German somehow translates to drunken apricot.  It was everywhere.  

It was just a beautiful place to walk around and enjoy the scenery.  At the church they had set up a large 'selfie' mirror so you could take pictures with the building in the background.

We walked along the Danube path for a while. We’ve seen bikers and walkers on these paths for miles and miles.  I don’t know for how much of the Danube these walkways exist, but it’s a lot!

Some on board rode bikes from Durnstein to our next stop, Melk. It was about 18 miles along the Danube.  We would have loved to have done it but we haven’t ridden bikes in a long long time and we really don’t want to deal with that kind of pain on this trip.

We arrived in Melk a little after 4PM and took a bus up to the Melk Abby.  It’s quite a complex that serves only 22 monks nowadays and most of them don’t even live there full time.  They have converted some of the Abby to a school for boys and girls.

It was a nice tour with a true religious scholar.  It was hard to know if he was kidding or not when he talked about the relics in the church.  Like the sliver of wood that was supposedly from the one true cross.  It exists at the Abby, but was he a true believer or was he skeptical, I couldn’t tell.  In any case he was very informative and it was a beautiful place.

After the tour we walked back to the ship, about a mile or so.  We decided to have dinner in town for a change of pace and chose this restaurant that was, we think, part of an old stable.  Great food and the waiter was from Bratislava and recognized Fred’s last name as Slovak and had an idea where that family name exists in Slovakia today.  That was fun.

On the way back we took a path that looked like it was headed to the river (it was) through the woods.  It was very pretty and well used.  It took us the Danube bike path and we headed back to the ship.

Tomorrow, we were supposed to do a full day tour to Salzburg but it was going to be a very long day and the city will be packed since this is a long weekend here.  Besides, we’ve been there before.  Instead, we’ll sleep in and take a tour in Passau Germany in the afternoon.

Vienna

We have been really looking forward to this stop.  I don’t remember how many times I tried to tie Vienna into one of our European vacations but never could.

We arrived this morning to pouring down rain and a 53 degree Fahrenheit temperature.  It wasn’t pleasant looking at all.  

Our tour left around 9AM and by then it was just chilly and windy but it threatened rain all day.  The skies opened up again in the afternoon but we were back at the ship by then.  The tour was mostly on foot and it was not comfortable with the weather.  We were disappointed but you can’t do anything about it, right?

We had the option of staying in town after the tour and had it been sunny and pleasant we would have done that, had lunch and looked around some more.  We had jackets on but I didn’t have a hat and we could have used light gloves.  I did buy a hat, so there’s my one souvenir for the trip.

Vienna was the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and as such has many spectacular buildings and residences.  We got to see a few clearly enough from the bus for some pictures.  Walking around we were just too close to get good shots of these magnificent places, but that’s what happens sometimes.  If we hadn’t been on a tour we would have been able to spend more time at the locations.

On river cruises they include all your tours for the most part.  They are at best introductory.  Since we’ve never been on one we didn’t understand that.  Vienna is one stop I wish we had gone with a private tour on our own.

One surprise along the way was visiting the ‘world famous’ Lipizzaner Stallions’ stable.  We lucked out and they were being taken out of their paddocks and into the training area so we got to see more than just their heads poking out from the stable.  The 2nd picture isn’t a really good of the horse but you can see that they aren’t very tall compared to a quarter horse or race horse.  

We’re trying not to let the bad weather color our opinion of Vienna, it was just bad luck.  We also got bad news about our trip to Salzburg on Sunday.  It’s a holiday, Pentecost Sunday, and the town will be swarming with people on a long weekend.  Traditionally, stores, restaurants and other sights would be closed on a religious holiday but we hope Salzburg is too much of a tourist town to shut down.  We have been there before so it’s less important to us than others.

Tomorrow looks like improving weather as we continue to tour new locations in Austria.  

I don’t know what this has to do with anything but it was in the middle of the old town Bratislava.  Enjoy.

Slovakia is where Fred’s grandfather was born so we were excited to see Slovakia’s capital city. Slovakia has about 4 million people and most of them live close to Bratislava.  

There was no increased security that we noticed because of the attempted assassination of the Prime Minister yesterday.  Our guide never talked about it and no one brought it up.

After having several nice weather days in Budapest our luck ran out and we had some rain and coolish temperatures.

We left the dock in Budapest at 11PM last night so this morning we were still sailing along. About 9ish we went through the first of several locks we’ll encounter on this voyage.  Today’s lock was required because we had to go around a huge hydroelectric dam.  We were in the lock with a Viking ship and it was a pretty fast process and we were on our way.

Bratislava has its own charm but no ‘must see’ sites.  Our walking tour took us around the old town area and the guide talked about the country.  

At one point, while we were waiting for people who were in the restroom, she talked about her family and how they were affected by the fall of communism. Her father lost his position as a director for a TV manufacturer because of increased competition from better makers.  That was tough on the family and she said her mother longed for the old days of communism.  It was just too big of a change for them. We heard this in Hungary too, it’s a major paradigm shift and some of the older population never adjusted. 

Slovakia had the added burden of being part of the former Czechoslovakia.  Communism fell in 1989-90 but the country didn’t split in two until 1992.  That split, although amicable, meant Slovakia was slower to adopt democracy.  Today, their economy is doing pretty good and they are one of the largest automobile manufacturers in Europe. Several car companies have established plants in the city.

The city is pretty enough and it looks like they’re trying to bring more tourists in by sprucing up the place.  Working against this is their new PM who is threatening to take over all the media in the country and has already stopped aid to Ukraine.  Slovakia is a member of NATO and the EU.  Would we live here?  No, we would not.

I was able to get a picture of the entire ship on our way back.  Ours is the one closest the shore.  The other ship is another AMAWaterways craft, the Viola.  People from that ship had to walk through our ship to get to the dock.  This is very common with river boats.

Tomorrow we’ll be in Vienna.  Our first time in that city, although we’ve been to Austria before.

Budapest and Sail Away - May 15, 2024

Our ship, the AMASonata, doesn’t leave Budapest until 9:15 tonight but we can get on board this afternoon.  We decided to do some more walking around the city before the we take the shuttle over to the ship.

So, yes, like so many other cities around the world Budapest has their ‘eye’.  A ferris wheel in the middle of the city.  It wasn’t running when we were there but I bet it affords a great view of the area.

After walking for a while just admiring the city we stopped at St. Steven’s Basilica for a look see.  St. Steven was the first king of Hungary, some 1000 years ago.  He was later made a saint.  The basilica was awesome with beautiful gilding throughout. There was one really odd thing there however. St. Steven’s hand (allegedly).  It’s kept as a relic and is trotted out every once in a while for festivals.  It’s hard to see in the picture because of the casing but up close its black and icky looking.

We took the 1:30 shuttle to the ship and had a light lunch there.  The rooms weren’t available until 3PM but it was nice just to relax for a while.

This is a picture of our room, it has a split balcony.  This is unique to this company.  It gives you a balcony but you also have a little more space in your room to sit.  The bathroom was roomy enough for us.  I don’t know what the square footage is, it’s not a lot, but they did a good job laying things out. There was another ship docked up next to ours for a few hours and that's what you can see in the balcony picture.

The Captain and crew did a lengthy safety and use of the ship talk, seriously it was about an hour! Then we went to dinner.

Dinner is at 7PM each night, a little later than we would like but we’ll deal with it.  There is only the one included dining room and then there is a ‘Chef’s Table’ restaurant for an additional charge but I believe dinner is at the same time.  

So, Fred and I don’t drink but we don’t care if other people do of course.  But here’s the thing on this ship, the wine and beer are free and unlimited.  It gets LOUD!  Hopefully people will tone it down as time goes on but we’ll see.

Tomorrow we’ll encounter our first lock (there are many on the Danube) and get into Bratislava in the afternoon.  We just heard there was an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister in Slovakia.  The company isn’t expecting any issues with our visit but we may see more security then normal.  Their PM is a hard liner who supports Russia in most things.  Hopefully, all will go well.

Budapest

Budapest is divided by the Danube River and consists of two formally separate cities, Buda and Pest (pronounced Pesh not Pest like an insect). Buda is the older city and we took a tour there in the morning, and then another one covering Pest in the afternoon.

Neither location has any ‘must see’ sites but it was all very interesting.  Both tour guides talked about the change to the country after the Soviets were thrown out in 1990.  The last 34 years have been the ‘happy times’ as described by them.

The city is beautiful, very clean with a lively vibe.  We’re staying on the Pest side and there are pedestrian zones, shops, restaurants, you name it.  Everyone has told us that the city is very safe and you can feel comfortable walking around at night.  Fred and I have a scale, if you will, when we visit a new city, we have to answer the question, would we live here?  Budapest gets a yes.  Rome, for example, was a no because it’s just too crazy, but we would definitely visit again!

We started the Buda tour at the former Palace location.  Buda is very hilly and the palace is on top of a hill.  There’s picture of it from a restaurant in yesterday’s post.  We didn’t go inside, it’s a museum now and a lot of the square footage is used for events.  It is massive and was built when Hungary was part of the Austria-Hungary Empire, under the Hapsburgs.  That empire ended after World War I and the palace stopped being used.  

The current Prime Minister has his office nearby (even though the Parliament is across the river).  He likes to connect to the old royal themes and is moving more government agencies over there.  Hungary shares a border with Ukraine, the people of Hungary supported Ukraine in the war, but the PM begged to differ causing widespread protests.  He has since backed down a little.

We visited Mathias Cathedral, named for a former king of Hungary.  It’s unusual to have a Catholic Church without a Saint’s name but apparently there’s workaround…It had a very pretty roof.

From the Buda side you can see the massive Parliament Building.  This building is seen in the background of a lot Viking River Tour ads.

After the tour the guide dropped us off at the Market Building, a combination farmers market, tourist trap and, in the basement, a fish and pickle market.  We didn’t go down to see the fish and pickles, our loss I’m sure. The market was interesting and we had lunch there.

Our afternoon tour began at 2:30 and I have to admit, we were pretty tired.  It was a beautiful day but a little warm in the sun.  We’re just not use to that yet.  

There were two real highlights of the tour, the Parliament Building and a very moving holocaust memorial.

When we walked up to the holocaust memorial the guide announced ‘we are here’, I didn’t see anything and didn’t know what to expect.  The memorial consists of shoes lined up along the Danube.  Holocaust victims were lined up here, told to take off their shoes and were shot and killed, falling into the river as they died.  It’s been estimated that tens of thousands might have met their death this way.

From there we walked up to the Parliament Building.  This, like the Palace, is massively oversized.  It was built when Hungary was part of the Empire and needed the space for all its member nations.  Now, with a population of only about 1.7 million people, the government only needs to use about 20% of the building.

We ended the day by driving down one of Budapest’s prettiest boulevards.  

Tomorrow we have the morning on our own and then we’ll be transported to the ship.