Happy Easter Sunday morning. Our cruise on the Rhine finds us pulling into Cologne, Germany, (Köln in German). Nearly everything except churches, beer halls and restaurants will be closed today in honor of a holiday most Germans no longer celebrate in church.
Europe’s fine old churches and cathedrals should be thought of as ‘museums of faith’ and, of course, as tourist attractions. The death of faith as a life-organizing principle came to Europe earlier than to the U.S. and the rest of the world (except perhaps Japan where it also arrived early). The attendees at services here are mostly elderly women, and not many of those.
My fascination with river cruising rekindled almost as soon as we left the dock in Amsterdam. The Rhine flows north-northwest to the sea and is a watery autobahn or ‘highway’ that is truly interstate.
So far I’ve seen riverine oil tankers, bulk carriers filling the dump truck role, container ships, local excursion boats, sail powered yachts running under auxiliary power, cabin cruisers, other hotel ships like ours, ferries, work boats of various shapes and sizes, and barge pushers with unstreamlined front ends. When we get farther upriver I expect we will see some small boats with outboard motors and even canoes and kayaks as well as people fishing on the banks.
Some of the most interesting ships are the motorized barges which are also the homes of the families who own and operate them, complete with family car on the dwelling’s roof and a crane or davit to hoist it on and off the ship. These ply the Rhine, Moselle, Main, and Danube rivers hauling all sorts of stuff - bulk or containerized cargo.
As we learned on previous river cruises, the barge children live aboard until it’s time for school, when they go to special boarding schools for “river kids” who then spend holidays on shipboard with the parents. Some families have been “river folk” for generations, and some of the hotel ships have a captain who grew up “on the river.” I suppose it could be thought of as a riverine subculture, likely multilingual though identifying as Belgian, Dutch, German or French.
A river ship can cruise from the North Sea to the Black Sea, traversing a series of locks to get them over the higher terrain where the Main canal connects the Danube to the Rhine. I suspect it is uncommon for freight ships to make the entire journey across Europe, it’s likely they specialize in one major river or the other.
The hotel ships like ours do sometimes make the entire trip from Amsterdam to Constanta on the Black Sea, and back. Even for them it is unusual to do the entire route. Routes like Amsterdam-Vienna, Amsterdam-Budapest, and Vienna-Constanta are the norm.
