River Cruise: Germany

After a lovely few days in Holland, we docked in Cologne, Germany, on Sunday April 7th. That morning, my dad and I took advantage of the walking tour excurision and got a great tour of this beautiful city. We particularly enjoyed seeing the amazing cathedral. We met up with my mom toward the end of the walking tour, and with the group, we checked out the Roman Germanic Museum.

Docked in Cologne aka Koln

Lovely street lining the river

Town square

The department store where the first cologne was sold!

Cologne Cathedral

Inside the Roman Germanic museum, where you learn
all about Cologne's Roman past.

Skin scrapers...yuck! They didn't bath but once or twice a year, so they
used these to scrape their skins clean. 

Stylish Roman jewelry 

Slate used by Roman school children

The fam outside the cathedral

After that, we headed over to grab a traditional German lunch at a cool beer house. In the cologne beer houses, they serve really nice lager in small glasses. The bar man will just keep bringing you more every time you finish a glass, making a tick on your coaster to count up how many you've had. It was so neat to try out this tradition! And we also made sure to eat a good German brat! Yum!

We really liked Fruh, which is light and a little too easy to drink!

Cheers, mom!

Mmm!

The barman delivering more beer and marking our coaster

My awesome lunch! Pork sausage, mashed potatoes and LOTS of sauerkraut 

When you're done, you put your coaster on your beer
to let him know you don't want anymore.

We took a nice, leisurely walk back down to the boat after lunch, checking out some of the shops along the way. My favorite stop was the German pretzel shop!

We didn't buy any of these, but even the Starbucks served
a pretzel sandwich!

German shepherd in Germany!

The Roman Germanic Museum and the cathedral

Inside the stunning cathedral

Cathedral door

Back on board

It was such a nice day, so we sat outside on the deck in the sun.
After so many COLD days, this was heavenly!

That night, we had a special event planned on the boat. The brought in a local men's shanty choir, which is basically a sailor's choir. The choir was great and so much fun!

View of the street carnival from the boat's window

Waiting for the shanty choir to start

The shanty choir

Doing some hand motions to accompany the song

The cute accordion player

Did you recognize that song?

The next day, we arrived in Braubach where we visited Marksburg castle. The castle is way up on a hill, so it has the most amazing views. Our tour guide was really informative and we learned all sorts of things about this great castle and the families that have lived there over the years.

There's the castle up on the hill

The guide locked us into the castle!

There's our boat!

Wine cellar

Kitchen

Kitchen 

Bedroom. So our guide was a very petite woman, and you can see how
small this bed still looks even next to her.

The toilet!

Windows were built small because they were left uncovered,
so having them too big would make the castle too cold. But,
the angle of the wall opens up to let as much natural light
in as possible. Very cool! This is where the musician would
hang out while he entertained the fancy people at dinner.

That door's a little small for my dad...

So charming!

Meet George Glass 

Inside the torture chamber

The rack inside the torture chamber. Yuck! 

Pops and I with the key to the castle!

Bye bye Marksburg Castle!

We all re-boarded the ship around noon, at which point it immediately set sail for our next destination: Rudesheim. But along the way, we were treated to spectacular views of many, many castles and cute little towns. Our tour director gave a running commentary of the castles we passed by, and most of the ship's guests gathered together on the upper deck to watch the views roll by. It was a relaxing, lovely afternoon.

We also passed the Loreley rock, which is where legend has it that a siren sits perched, ready to distract sailors who then crash into the rock cliffs. Luckily, we didn't crash!  :)

Statue of Loreley

Loreley Rock

Loreley Rock

Later that afternoon, we arrived in Rudesheim and had a few hours to walk around the town, which was super cute and totally fun. We even found a great little bar to have a drink. Rudesheim is famous for it's white wines, so I definitely wanted to try a local wine (it was great!). All three of us decided Rudesheim was darling, and we definitely wanted to spend more time there. But we had to hop back on the boat so we could sail off for Frankfurt.

Haha!

Haha!

Rudesheim

There were so many neat restaurants and bars in Rudesheim. 

This is the famous pedestrian street in Rudesheim, lined
with bars, restaurants and neat little shops.

We stopped in here for a quick drink.

The next morning we got up bright and early for another activity-packed day. It was our final day on the cruise, and we decided to take an optional excursion to Heidelberg instead of staying in Frankfurt because everyone said Heidelberg was a place not to miss. The day included a neat drive to the town, a visit to Heidelberg Castle, a walk with our tour guide through the main parts of Heidelberg, a traditional German lunch and some much needed free time for shopping. It was a rainy, yucky day, but the town was gorgeous, and we had a nice afternoon.

Coming up to Heidelberg Castle. 

In the castle courtyard

Amazing views off the back of the castle

The castle looks down on the town of Heidelberg. It's gorgeous.

The world's largest wine barrel. Nice!

We took a short ride on a little tram thing down into the city. 

Here's all the things that could go wrong on the tram...haha!

Downtown Heidelberg

Such a pretty little town. I loved it! It was like Leavenworth,
but actually a real German town.   ;)

These are the famous Heidelberg Kiss candies

We had our German lunch in this hotel

German Dachshunds

Our German lunch: Beef, noodles and red cabbage. Looks a bit odd but was
quite good, actually. 

View of the castle from the city

It was really starting to rain down hard by mid-afternoon, so we were all too happy to hop back on the bus where it was warm and dry. Our tour included a 45-minute bus ride through Frankfurt, so even though we didn't have time to walk around the city, we still saw it by bus. Frankfurt is a much more modern city than I realized. Here's just a few pics. As you can see from the one below, it was hard to get nice photos through the rain on the bus.

Frankfurt 

Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Back on the boat, we had our final, luxurious dinner. Then it was time to pack up all our things and squeeze in all those new treasures we had bought and get ready to say goodbye to our lovely Uniworld River Ambassador cruise boat in the morning. We had the most amazing eight days on our river cruise, and I was so sad to see this part of our trip end. I hope to someday be able to take another Uniworld river cruise through a different part of Europe.

Luckily, though, we still had one more leg of our journey to go--a nice train up to Normandy where would spend the next four days exploring this beautiful bit of French countryside. So we got up bright and early (hello, 5 a.m.), bid adieu to our boat, and made our way to the train station for part three of our Easter Extravaganza, aptly nicknamed "The Keagles Take On Europe."