This was a Sunday and our stop in the afternoon saw at Speyer, Germany. There was a pretzel fair in Speyer that day, so it was very crowded. We walked through a lot of people to visit the Chapel they had there. We did get to see part of the parade. I felt we were in part in the way of the celebration.
One thing I notice on the way is there was a park. Like a park we went through the day before in Rudersheim there was a miniature golf course attached. My daughter lives in Cheyanne, Wyoming and they have the same thing. I think that is a good place to put miniature golf courses as that would be a fun thing to do while having a picnic if you get bored.
The Speyer Cathedral we visited is a heritage site and had a clock tower on the outside. It being Sunday we weren’t allowed inside as they could have services. We could go up one at a time and peek in the windows that wasn’t that impressive.
The tour ended at the Church area, where we watched the parade. We could have visited some of the booths, but my wife and I were worried about finding our way back to the ship. Our memories were better than we thought as we made it back with no problem. In fact, we stopped and looked at the river. A couple we had seen but had not talked to on the ship asked if wanted our picture taken together. We took pictures and had a nice discussion. This was probably my least favorite tour, but it was still fun.
Now earlier when I talked about Cologne I said we didn’t do much in the afternoon. However, we visited Augustusburg Castle which home to prince archbishops of Cologne. I thought this was later in the tour, but when I looked it up I found it was Cologne. On the outside the castle looks like a big mansion, but it is a castle on the inside. There was a fireplace in almost every room. Someone in our tour, either to give our guide a hard time or just had a weird fascination, asked in each room if the fireplace still worked. This was good as are guide who started off as very proper began to have fun with us the second half of the tour. The staircase was one of the highlights of the tour, but to me it was the painted ceilings way above the main dining room. The guide mentioned how the ceilings curved and how difficult it was for the artists to make the paintings look good two floors below. I was very impressed with what the artist had done.
Our Viking tour guide, took us through a walk with through the garden out back. Again, I was more impressed with the ones in Ireland, although this was a bigger garden. Our guide pointed out how the Germans like uniformity and the plants were repeated throughout the garden. This garden had purple flowers that were a beautiful color of purple. Purple being my favorite color and these being my favorite shade of purple, I think they were my favorite flower of all time. My wife was not as impressed with those flowers as I was.
Back to Day 8, dinner that night was a buffet of German food. We got to try different German foods, provided by our wait staff as we went through a line. While it was fun to try different foods I enjoyed the dinners we ordered off the menu a lot more.
That evening our cruise director provided the music with the regular piano player. He was a lot of fun and could change his voice to fit the song. It was an enjoyable evening for a nice day.
