The river cruise begins

 We had a gentle start to the day with a late check out of our hotel. Our new home is the APT Solara. The boat is absolutely beautiful. It is a fairly new boat and it looks it. Our room is amazing. We have what they call a Juliet balcony but the name doesn't convey the right image. We have a window that runs the whole width of our room. The top half of the window electronically slides down inside the lower half. That gives us a huge open air exposure to the outside. Right now, that doesn't make a lot of difference as we are still in Amsterdam. When we get going down the river tomorrow, it will be fantastic vantage point.

We are getting to know the other passengers. 99% of them are Australian, a few Kiwis and English people. Thankfully, it seems there are no Americans on the boat at all. We are seriously looking forward to the next 2 weeks.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 Back in 1997, Ian and I travelled to Europe for a 5 week pre-wedding honeymoon. At the time, I'm sure we never thought it would be another 28 years before we would do a trip with just the two of us again. Tomorrow, we head off to Europe for 4 weeks. We are looking a lot worse for wear than we did in 1997 but our wallets are much healthier than they were back then. We are excited to travel just the way we want to (no theme parks or family restaurants), but we are also just a little anxious about not having the kids with us. Our itinerary begins at 5pm tomorrow when the Emirates chauffeur picks up at home. We plan on thoroughly enjoying some time in the Emirates lounge before heading off to Dubai and then Lisbon. After a few days in Lisbon, we fly to Amsterdam to meet our river cruise heading down the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers through Germany, Austria and Hungary to finish in Budapest. Finally, we fly to Bordeaux to pretend we are French people for a week. As we have done with o...
Read more

Day 2 in Lisbon

Image
 Thanks to our jet lag, we were awake at 4am. We had the chance to see a quiet Lisbon gradually wake up which was a nice contrast to the high energy city we experienced yesterday.  After a coffee at Paul , we headed up to the Castelo de Sao Jorge.  This is the magnificent fortress built in 1147 and still standing today (even after a massive earthquake in 1755). We had a lovely time wandering around the grounds. One of the fun features of the Castelo is the peacocks who make their home there and spend their days strolling around the fortress. Next, we went in search of a gluten free pasteis de nata. We found them but, I have to admit, they were disappointing. Once you take the beautiful flaky pastry out and replace it with a stodgy GF pastry, it just isn't the same.   We got back on the Hop On, Hop Off bus to take a different route past the waterfront in Lisbon. We saw the Belem Tower  (which was covered in scaffolding) and the Mosterio dos Jeronimos . When...
Read more

Sintra and Cascais

Image
 Incredible day. We signed up for a day tour to Sintra and Cascais. Sintra is a hill town about 30 mins outside Lisbon. It used to be where the royals went for their downtime. Now, it is a very popular tourist town. We were in a small group of 8 people and our guide, Patrik, was fantastic! After a quick coffee stop in Sintra town, we headed up the hills to  Quinta da Regeleira . The house and grounds were designed by a leading architect for Antonio Augusto de Carvalho Monteiro. He was a private citizen who was a Free Mason. The design of the estate has loads of references to masonry and spiritualism. Weird but a beautiful estate. Then, we moved onto  Pena Palace  which is three very distinctive colours reflecting the three different buildings that were created there and joined together. After lots of walking and learning about the history of the area and the palaces, Patrik took us to lunch at a family owned restaurant which he described as a hidden gem. The family h...
Read more