Greetings All, Well, we’ve taken another trip. This time we traveled with Vantage Travel on the trip they call “Switzerland & The Heart Of The Rhine & Moselle” It was a 16 day river cruise, from September 8th to the 24th 2012, with a lot of stops. I’ve tried to capture a bit of the trip with the following pictures and narratives. Hope you like ’em…
One note: I’m using a new web site development tool called “WordPress” so the appearance will be different from that of our previous trip reports. This Home Page is really Page 00. To navigate to another page, just return to the top and select another page.
First off, here is the map of our trip on the Rhine and Moselle Rivers. Our trip took us from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, all the way to Basel, Switzerland. We stopped at all of the destinations shown by the round symbols (We skipped the pre- and post- trips shown by the triangles).
Although, most of the time we were in Germany, we also visited Luxembourg, and a bit of France.
We sailed a total of 662 miles on the Rhine and Moselle Rivers, passed through 26 locks (some twice going up and down the Moselle), and docked 14 times.
One note about Vantage Travel: The trip itinery, the ship, the crew, the Program Managers, the dining service, and especially the food was First Class all the way. The word among travelers is “You pay more, but you get more.” This is so true with Vantage Travel. There was only one extra cost “optional excursion” (This was a balloon ride for $500 apiece. 13 people signed up – not us.) Everything else was “included”. We even received cash to pay for a couple of lunches when we were not on board for that meal.
Also, we’ve taken other trips on big cruise ships where you’re an anonymous passenger and there are huge quantities of food available almost all the time. On this Vantage ship most of the service personnel know our names and food is served in multi-courses with smaller portions of high quality “gourmet” food.
One Picture before we get started: This is Anja, our Belgian “Orange Group” Program Manager. She was more than excellent. She ushered our 30+ person Group around like we were a flock of ducklings. She narrated many of our bus rides with stories of local culture and geography. She even threw in a couple of stories about her boyfriend and his reluctance to “pop the question”.
Here is a Page by Page, Day to Day,Town to Town “Table of Contents”:
- Page 1 Day 1: Leaving Home
- Page 2 Day 2: Amsterdam, Neth.
- ” Day 3: Amsterdam (continued)
- ” ” Amsterdam/ Rhine Canal
- ” Day 4 Cologne, Ger.
- ” Day 5 Rhine River
- Page 3 Day 5 Moselle River
- ” ” Moselle River (continued)
- ” ” Cochen, Ger.
- ” Day 6 American Cemetery, Lux
- ” ” Luxembourg City, Lux
- Page 4 Day 7 Trier, Ger
- ” ” Nells Winery & Restaurant
- Page 5 Day 8 Bernkastel, Ger.
- ” Day 9 Rhine River & Castles
- ” ” Ships Officers & Staff
- ” ” Rudesheim
- ” ” Schloss Vollrads Winery
- Page 6 Day 10 Mainz, Ger.
- ” ” Heidelburg, Ger.
- Page 7 Day 10 Heidelburg (continued)
- ” Day 11 Baden Baden, Ger.
- Page 8 Day 12 Colmar, France.
- ” ” Riquewhir, France
- Page 9 Day 13 Strasbourg, France
- ” ” Ship – Coo Coo Clocks
- Page 10 Day 14 Freiburg, Ger.
- ” Day 15 Basel, Switzerland
- ” Day 16 To Home
Nuff said. Fasten your seat belts and let’s get started.