River Cruise Fall 2014

We are home from our fabulous European River Cruise, our gift to ourselves for reaching our 50 year anniversary.  What a fabulous experience.  Some of you may be aware that I tried to do a couple of blogs when we were away, but with little or no success, since it turned "German" and I couldn't make out the instructions.  It was less than successful, but now that we're home, it seems to have reverted to English again.  So I will attempt to post a few pictures each day for awhile to show those who are interested a bit of our experience.

We opted to do the cruise with a Canadian, family-run company called "Journeys by Jerry Van Dyke".  Although at first glance, it appears to be more expensive than most, we found that in the end, it wasn't.  We were picked up at home in an airport limousine, and dropped off at home after the trip.  We were told that we could leave our wallet at home, and it's true!  Aside from anything you might want to buy, absolutely EVERYTHING was covered.                                    

We left Pearson on Sept. 25 and flew overnight (six-hour time difference) on a Lufthansa plane to Munich, Germany, then on to Zurich, Switzerland.

Lena, a Dutch lady, was one of our "Journey managers".  She was a really super and knowledgeable lady.  The other Journey manager was Jeremy Van Dyke, one of the owners' sons.

Apparently Switzerland has more tunnels than any country in the world, and we went through a LOT of them.  The longest one we went through was 3.2 km's, but there is one somewhere that is 17km's long!  Erin, I thought of you every time I went through one - tunnelllllll !

And here we are arriving at the beautiful Da Vinci on the Rhine River in Basel, Switzerland.

It took us awhile to figure out what this was just behind our boat.  The Rhine river has an amazing current, and there was a passenger ferry going back and forth across the river behind us.  There was no engine in the little boat, it was just pushed along by the current, and tethered to this cable, which kept it from floating downstream. 

And this was the little boat being pushed along.  All it has is the cable and a rudder to help steer it a bit.  Cool!