May 23, 2017
We have been so busy or so exhausted I haven't been able to update this for a while.
We are currently on a plane from Prague to Bucharest, where we will spend a few days before boarding our river cruise on Saturday.
We continued our restful transatlantic cruise until Wednesday (May 17) when our lazy days were rudely interrupted by arriving in the port of Brest, France. What was this stuff under our feet?? Ground?? It was raining and foggy, but not too cold, and we took a nice tour of the "mythical coast"...apparently so named because it was truly a myth due to the heavy fog making it nearly impossible to see the coast or anything else more than 50 feet away. This port was not on our original itinerary, but we stopped here in lieu of the Horta, Portugal stop we were supposed to make a few days ago. We saw the lower half of a lighthouse (the upper half was in the fog), and the ruins of a great church/cathedral. It was about a half day tour and things cleared up a bit so we wandered around the town, found an ATM to get a few Euros, and ate crepes for lunch. Apparently they are famous for their crepes in Brest, and there was quite a selection available. We enjoyed them. The savory one was made from a buckwheat flour, so it was much heavier/heartier than the crepes we are used to...the dessert crepe with caramel was very good and more familiar. We returned to the ship to rest up for the next day. This was our second country outside the U.S. Since we left Florida.
The traditional houses have two fireplaces. One side was for the human inhabitants the other for the animals, which were brought into the houses in the cold, cold winters. Today it is just a style, and one of the fireplaces is just for appearances from the outside -- most people in modern times don't keep their farm animals inside their homes!
Another rainy day!!
On Thursday we arrived in Cherbourg, France. We had no tours planned here so we had a lovely time walking around town, wandering through the open markets in the squares where the locals were carrying their baskets and shopping bags and purchasing their daily grocery needs. It is a lovely old village with winding streets, a lot of churches and a lot of statues. After our walk we took a ride on a little tourist train that took us to the marina and a pretty garden in the center of town. Then we waited for the shuttle back to the ship by having a glass of wine in a sidewalk cafe. Life is good!
We found the pillar above interesting. Coming onto the main street from a side street, if the light was red, this pillar came up out of the street to physically block cars from continuing. The light turned green and the pillar retracted!
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg!
In the Market..
This shop was closed, so not sure if they were making or repairing these musical instruments.
Our veranda is the one in the middle in this shot. We were on the aft of the ship. The "caravan" shown is coming off a ferry into town.
Friday brought us to our 3rd new country...Belgium. We docked in Zeebruge and took a 45 minute tour bus ride to Bruges, where we spent the next several hours on a walking tour and canal boat ride. Another lovely old town. I guess because we live in such a "new" country where most cities (and buildings) are less than 300 years old, it is always amazing to see 1000+ year old houses in which people still live! We ate lunch at a local brewery...where they have a pipeline that delivers their beer to a location out of town. It seems it was more economical to send the beer this way than to transport it by truck. They used some sort of crowd-funding system to finance the pipeline. Unfortunately for the locals there are no taps along the way...wouldn't it be cool to just have your beer piped right into your house!
The four horsemen of the apocalypse
Beer Wall
Beer Scooter
Canal Boat Ride....DUCK!!
Beer Pipeline!
This was our last day on our Holland America cruise, and the evening was taken up with packing in preparation for our disembarkation the next day. Suitcases have to be packed and outside your door before you go to bed. The logistics of what to keep with you overnight, what to pack, what to wear or carry off the ship always seem daunting.
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