55 - Europe Part IV

As we left Bruges, Belgium.. we headed  a short distance away to Brussels, a place I had visited on my very first trip to Europe for business (a co-worker and I went there for a long weekend). Brussels is a very beautiful city, and at some time, I'll have to tell you the story of my first visit there. It was quite hilarious.

The bad news was, the tour guide was a strict "time-nazi", and we had to just about run to one spot, then run to another, take pictures then rush back to the bus to leave. I was VERY upset over this and when the trip ended, I complained quite loudly to the tour company (Globus).

One of THE most beautiful places in Brussels, is The Grand Place, (at right) a center of town with incredibly old buildings. Click on any picture to 'embiggen'. The age of the buildings is staggering, but the condition is breathtaking.

We got a chance to quickly walk around The Grand Place before being rushed out.

The next picture, is very large when you blow it up, but I wanted it that way to show you how intricate the work is.

Some of the buildings are "town" buildings, one is a brewery (we all need one of those don't we), and one other is a museum.

Unfortunately, the shadows from it being still early morning kind of messed up the pictures.

Here's a link to a site with a great picture of The Grand Place. You can see that it just takes your breath away.
This is a 360 degree picture (you can spin it around) of the same place. They often sell flowers there, and once a year have a huge flower show that takes up the whole floor of the square.

From Brussels, we rode the bus again through Belgium, into Germany to the Rhine River where we boarded a riverboat for a cruise to see some beautiful castles. The trip took us from Cologne, to Koblenz, about 60 miles. Along the way, we say castles like this. The views were gorgeous and there were many vineyards along the hills near the castles.

The next picture, is of a castle right smack dab in the middle of the Rhine, that we were told was built by King Ludwig, who later built Neuschwanstein Castle, the most famous castle in all of Europe.

When the cruise ended in Koblenz, we boarded the bus again for a trip to Heidelberg, where we would spend the night. We were supposed to get to spend some time in town, where I was going to take my wife up to see Heidelberg castle which I've visited before, but the "time nazi" was all upset as we were a tiny bit late (under 15 minutes), so the best I could do was the following picture.

This is where I really started getting ticked off at the tour guide, and when we got to the hotel, I was online checking my emails from home when I saw he was waiting for me so he could get online, and I made HIM wait. I tried to talk to him about relaxing his timetable a bit, but (and no pun intended, he was German) he got all crazy about having to be on time to the minute. I gave up..

More when I can....

BTW, Thursday is my doctors appointment, so any nice wishes you can send along would be appreciated.

Not sure if there will be a Friday post.. as I'm taking both Thursday and Friday off.

With that, have a wonderful Easter this weekend.

Till the next wave........