Our home for the next week.....courtesy of Uniworld
.
After being welcomed aboard we enjoyed a buffet in the lounge area.
Not only was there good food, there was a liquid refreshment or two also.
This young lady took our drink order once and never forgot what we wanted when we walked into the lounge.
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| Paul, Barbara, Becci, Matt & Dianne |
That kept us busy while they took our suitcases to our room.
Our room. Lots of space for our stuff. On the shelves below you can barely see a little statue of Daisy, our dalmatian on the top shelf, and T.H. (more about him below) on the bottom shelf. Beds were comfortable and I wish I was waking up in one tomorrow morning.
The room was really comfortable and certainly large enough for us to sleep and get dressed. The rest of the time we were on the deck watching the world go by.
This shot is looking in from the outside, well it is showing the
reflection anyway :) The little teddy bear is one from Shoney's given
to me by a friend when I was doing a lot of traveling to NASCAR races by
myself. She didn't want me to have to be alone in the car so she
bought him for me one day. I named him T.H. for Tom Hanks who is almost
as cute. He has become my travel angel and goes where I do, the rest
of the time he sits in my office/love-you room waiting patiently.
Up on the top deck all was quiet. Soon this would be the center of most of our days when we weren't on shore excursions.
The deck was split between the covered area and the sun tanning area.
The bridge (is that the right word?) was right in front of these areas - as you can see the captain and first officer were having one last chance to relax and share war stories.
The anchor was pulled and we were on our way to Cologne.
Assorted and suundry photos of what we saw leaving Amsterdam.
The trains run one way on each side of the canal.
Finally on the Rhine proper and off the canal.
The Ruhr Valley in the 1800's was a coal mining area. The coal crisis of the 1960's saw many of these mines shut down and jobs were halved. A considerable effort was made to bring this area back to the affluence it had known and it was successful. Now "Ruhrpott" is a thriving metropolis of both urban living and industry.
Perhaps more interesting is a discovery made in 1856 in a little known mining area. The remains of a dead man were found and through scientific testing was deemed a contemporary of the Cro Magnon man and was named Neanderthal. We didn't find any dead bodies or see Neanderthal.
Leading up to the locks that took us into the valley we passed these....
So next we will go through the locks, through the valley and on to Cologne....lots of neat stuff in Cologne besides the cathedral.
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