The travel adventures of Mark & Vanessa Greatorex
I don’t want to give the impression that we weren’t having a good time of things on the cruise – far from it. It’s just that a couple of events over the past few days had taken a slight edge off what would otherwise have been a perfect trip. Yesterday’s lock failure was just one…
I woke early, as I had every day since our departure a week earlier, and as usual I set up my laptop in order to process all of yesterday’s photos and opened the curtains to gaze out into the darkness. The ship had stopped, presumably to wait for the all clear to enter a lock,…
We woke this morning to another cool, overcast day, as we slowly approached our mooring along the banks of the River Main in the city of Würzburg. Ahead of us, the Alte Mainbrücke (Old Main Bridge) spanned the river, dating back to the 15th Century when it was built to replace an older 12th Century…
The official programme for the day listed us as stopping in Miltenberg at around 12:30 PM, with the tour of the town starting after lunch onboard. As it turned out, we actually arrived a little before midday, so Vanessa and I decided that we’d hop off as soon as the ship had tied up, and…
Having turned from the Rhine River on to the River Main at around 10:30 pm the previous evening, our ship made steady progress throughout the night, passing major cities such as Mainz, Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg along the way. As the dawn broke, we found ourselves gliding along the much more tranquil waters of the Main…
Fresh from a bath and lunch in the main restaurant, we walked down the gangplank onto the main dock at Rüdesheim am Rhein a little before 1:00 pm and immediately made our way up the hill to Weingut Adolf Storzel for a stroll through the vineyards. Our vineyard walk was hosted by Hans, a very…
Our ship departed Andernach in the early hours of the morning, which sadly meant that we passed a couple of significant landmarks, namely the confluence of the Moselle and Rhine Rivers at Koblenz and the giant Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, in total darkness. In fact, it wasn’t until we rounded the bend at Braubach that first light…
Day 4 of our cruise began with another spectacular sunrise, as the AmaVerde slowly cruised its way towards a dawn docking at the German city of Cologne. As the light began to creep across the land, the unmistakable sight of the Cologne Cathedral, the Kölner Dom, came into view, and soon the ship was making…
Our first sunrise in Europe was a masterpiece fit for a museum, and thanks to a wildly malfunctioning body clock I was well and truly awake to see it. I had actually managed to get some sleep, although it came in fits and starts. Given the early hour that we had retired the night before…
On arrival at Amsterdam Schipol we learnt a valuable lesson – always have a small amount of local currency on you when traversing an airport. Even if you are being met at the gates for a pre-arranged transfer as we were, after almost a full day’s travelling, you’re probably going to want to grab a…