I bring you today a collection of random observations from a European river cruise.
❀ I was wrong about being done with locks. There are locks on this portion of the upper Danube too. They are bigger and the overheads are higher. Because of that latter difference, the ship’s rooftop sun deck has been reestablished and the stairways to access it are no longer roped off.
❀ I haven’t mentioned our crew. As is typical in cruise ships, the crew is divided into “ship” and “hotel” personnel. Think of “ship” as sailors, they know how to run the ship, do repairs, reconfigure to go under low bridges, tie us up, configure landing ramps, maintain the machinery, etc.
Think of “hotel” as those providing passenger care. They include room attendant/maids, waiters, cooks, bartenders, entertainers, the fellow who fills the “cruise director” slot and the front desk folk. Plus unseen somebodies run the laundry and wash the dishes.
Most of these ships sit idle in the winter, except for a few which do a couple of December “Christmas markets” runs on the Rhine. The cruising season is roughly April to October. I’ll have to ask our waiters what they do in the off-season. Do you suppose they work at ski resorts which are busier in winter? More on this later.
A fun thing to watch is the human chain that is used to move food and other consumables from shore to ship and into storage. Every crew member takes a place in the chain and things get handed from one to the next until they reach dry or cold storage down in the hold. I was reminded of early days bucket brigades trying to douse a fire.
A number of nationalities are represented. Eastern Europeans predominate, logically: Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and well as a few from Asia - Philippines, Indonesia, etc. They are uniformly pleasant, polite, hard-working, and friendly. I suppose Viking gets the credit for this, either by weeding out those who don’t fit “the model” or by a combination of selection and training.
It is possible some of the “ship” side folk are from nations along this great river system, they are more likely to be from “river” families, growing up on a motorized barge. We pax don’t routinely interact with the sailors, so I have less info on them.
❀ I noticed this a.m. we’re tied up with our bow pointed upstream and, being curious, asked why considering our route is headed downstream on the Danube which here is green, not blue. The answer may interest you.
In this section of river the current is considered “strong.” We turned around and headed upstream to dock so our sharp bow is pointed upstream into the strong current. This causes less drag on the moorings than if our blunt stern was pointed into the current. I wouldn’t have thought it would matter, and it obviously does or they wouldn’t have bothered.
❀ I saw a logging truck today and was reminded of home. Logging makes sense in the Black Forest but I hadn’t expected it. At various places along the river I’ve seen quite large woodpiles of the sort one builds when stockpiling firewood for the winter. These weren’t as highly “engineered” as those the Swiss make, but tidy nevertheless. I’d read that Europeans were getting back into burning wood when the boycotts of Russian oil kicked in a year.ago. Perhaps what I’ve seen this trip is evidence of that change.
❀ As we’ve cruised along I’ve noticed that all the houses in this part of Germany and Austria look very similar. Everything appears to be stuccoed, two or more stories, light cream or tan paint, brown roofs with gable ends. It’s like nobody wants to be an outlier with a different color, roof material, window size, etc. It looks very tidy as a result, no monstrosities but nothing beautiful either, rather drab in its uniformity.
❀ We’re having Northern European weather today, gray sky, some rain, not warm, and what I think of as watercolor moodiness. Yesterday we had everything - rain at times, sunshine at other times, lunch was served on the forward patio in open air, but those who went out after lunch on a tour got soaked with rain.
We rewatched The Longest Day which is available on the room TV and could empathize with Ike’s dilemma of the June weather in Normandy. They got a brief “window” in the storms, he took it and won a gamble that could have gone the other way. That film had nearly every Hollywood male face in it, from teen idols to creaky old character actors.
Today feels like it could be gray all day. In mid-April, about what one would expect here. There is still snow on the ground in Wyoming so we’re in no great rush to go there, and in any event we have to go first to NV to tidy up things and that could take a month, though we hope not.
❀ We cruised the Wachau valley of Austria today, this is extra pretty country with lots of hillside vineyards looking down at the Danube. Not a lot of traffic on the roads either, maybe because it is early for tourists.
