River cruise

Every Sunday night at 9:00 I watch Masterpiece Theater.  Recently Viking River Cruises has become a sponsor, so every week we see an add for a river cruise. Their advertising was successful and this year Calvin and I took a cruise down the Danube from Nuremberg to Budapest.

We saw lots of medieval cities.  I liked this merchant home in Nuremberg that had a sundial on the right hand side about halfway up.  Even in the middle ages they liked to know what time it was.

 In Regensburg, another medieval city, we had bratwurst at a bratwurst shop that was supposed to have been at that location for 1000 years. It was right on the river and they had a record of the flood levels of the last few centuries on the shop.  Everyone was quite proud of their high water marks.  It kind of makes you wonder why they didn't either move to higher ground or build up the retaining wall.

 We heard an organ concert in Passau on Europe's largest pipe organ. The organ was incredible and it was a rainy day so we were happy to spend an hour out of the rain.

 We saw lots of churches, cathedrals, abbeys, and palaces and did a lot of eating.  

And we did a lot of following along behind a little red paddle with the Viking River Cruise emblem.  We used "quiet boxes" so the tour leader could speak in a normal voice and we could all hear well with our headsets.

 It appears that eating and drinking are the main features of a river cruise.  We did very little just cruising down the river looking at the scenery.  Most of the cruising was done at night.  I would have liked a little more daylight cruising. This is a small section of the river that we did cruise in daylight called the Wachau valley.

We did a lot of touring in Vienna but I liked these two sculptures in the pedestrian mall the best.  This plague column was built to give thanks to God from the survivors of the 1679 plague.

This modern installation was called "quantitative easing." Once an hour it spits out a euro for some lucky person waiting below.

 Calvin was not the lucky winner this hour.