More Euro Museums

Oh, there were many, but here's a couple I particularly enjoyed.

The first was the Dutch Railway Museum in Utrecht based in the old Maliebaan Station.  My goodness, so much to see.  Here's just a few pics.

And so much more, sorry I don't have more pics...

The other museum that overwhelmed me was in Speyer, Germany, on the day we played hooky from the cruise tour plans.  On our own, I think we had more fun, especially wandering the Technik Museum.    Oh, my god, trains and planes, and cars and space ships and (zillions) of motorcycles and so much more.  A few pics...

Notice the spiral slide for kids to descend from the 747 (and how did they get the plane into the museum in the first place?).

A Russian space shuttle (looks familiar!) and capsule...

And, of course, a classic VW bus...

Some German airplanes...

And a couple more German cars...  what a Benz!

And a couple musical oddities...

Then it was back to the dock along the Rhine to find the cruise ship...   Had to walk past the Speyer Beach Club on the way...

Euro Trip--The Castle Edition

OK, now you are going to get castles, castles, castles...

Perhaps the highlight of the Rhine cruise for me were all the castles that lined a significant length of the river.  But the castle morning opened cool and rainy, still we piled into buses and headed up to the Marksburg Castle for a tour of the never conquered castle with its 12 foot thick walls.

It is well preserved as a tourist stop with cannons, wine kegs, and (jutting out of the wall) the WC...

A view from the castle...

Then it was back to the boat (ship?) to begin the cruise past the castles.  Thankfully the weather 

cleared, and we could enjoy the sites (and the hot chocolate with rum).  So here's more castles than you'll ever want to see again...

We passed the infamous Lorelei statue and her rock that mythically lured sailors to their doom...

Even the road/railroad tunnels had castles...

And vineyards, many on very steep slopes...   I imagine immigrant labor was used to harvest the grapes...  Anyway, the Riesling from this area is infamous.

But we aren't done with castles...  on our road trip to Millau and back, we found a couple more...  the first from Puy, I think, or maybe it was Mende, or?

We were driving over some mountain ranges on a narrow road trying to find Vallon de Arc when this beaut popped out of the woods, the chateau de Champ...

Enough castles...  but they sure were cool...  a favorite part of the whole trip.

Bride of Euro Oddities

More curious pics I took on the great Euro adventure... and some new friends.

From Rudesheim am Rheim...  they are very proud of their wine...

And they will ship it anywhere...

My favorite advertising poster, from a fashion shop in Cologne...  This is amazing!  Style, style, style...hair, dress!, chair, shoes...

Speaking of fashion, I did think this was a laundromat in Lyon, but look again... a clothing store.

From Speyer, a modernist tribute to Orpheus...

A couple cars...  a new front-engined Ferrari (Silicon Valley isn't the only IPO center) and, well they still make MGs!  We just can't get them here.

Here's our cruise crew...  the first night's dinner established our group of reasonably like minded souls, and we hung out with them pretty much the whole cruise.

Speaking of the cruise, we had some good entertainment several nights.  A classical duo while docked at Cologne, and a fine French/German singer on another night...

And one of the finest bottles of wine I've ever drunk, and drunk I became...   Not that expensive, locally, unfortunately probably not found outside of France.

I'll finish with a wildflower from deep in the French forests...

Euro Oddities 2

From the narrow, cafe laden streets of Lyon...  these guys blew my mind (well, we had a lot of wine with dinner!)...  but what are the chances of street musicians, with this instrumentation, playing this tune (Brubeck lives!)?