Life in the Middle Age Lane

Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday August 29, 30 and 31st. Mannheim                  Koblenz Speyer                        Cologne Heidelberg Rudesheim Heidelberg Castle as backdrop for our selfie The Largest Wine Barrel (Heidelberg) The Castle has an amazing balcony that overlooks the town and Philosopher's walk, a prestigious area of this college town.  Steffi Graff owns a home here. You can spot some of the homes across the Neckar River, hillside. Heidelberg's Monkey on the Old Bridge  You can read about this monkey here . The river cruise offered various tours for its guest.  It went from Active to Regular, and Easy tours for the older crowd.  We did the Active and Regular tours depending on the town.  Most of the time we were bike riding along the countryside. John was having such a fun time.  I haven...

Monday , August 28,  2017 ,  Strasbourg As John and I are enjoying new cities our own city is being bombarded with rain for 4 straight days. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.  Houston underwent a horrible deluge of rain from Hurricane Harvey.  Many creeks surround Houston and its suburbs and when 50 inches of rain fall these creeks overflow, and overflow, and overflow.   By day two we upgraded our phone plan to keep in contact with everyone back home.  Harvey made the world news and everyone in every country asked us how our family and home were once they found out we were from Houston.  It was surreal. Only one person in our family took in water.  Luckily she only received inches of water and not feet, like many others.  It was still hard to enjoy ourselves without thinking of all the water our poor Houston was receiving. Back to Strasbourg.....We woke in this city and opted for a bike tour. ...

Killing time barside After seeing a few museums in Amsterdam and also visiting the Ann Frank House we flew over to Basel and had some time to kill.  We checked into the AmaKristina and requested two bikes to go into town.  It's great having GPS on your phone to get us around town. Most streets in Europe, imagine riding a bike on these cobblestones. It was a very unseasonably warm day in Basel and everyone was in the water.  Apparently, this part of the Rhine is acceptable for swimmers and boaters.  We found a little floating island curbside that locals would swim and sunbathe.  There are no beaches in the area so they made a man made one. Because the weather was warm, I packed all the wrong clothing for our trip.  I made due with what I had and mixed and matched the best I could.  Good thing the ship had laundry service at very reasonable rates. Amawaterways did a great job welcoming us onboard and our fellow shipmates we...

Any man that will profess his love in graffiti form on fruit for me has my heart John and I celebrated 20 years of marital bliss on August 31 of this year.  We have grown up together, lived a lifetime of ups and downs and still look forward to seeing what the day will bring us. We have raised two wonderful children together.  Who also helped us grow up and grow together. We celebrated this milestone by taking TWO WHOLE WEEKS traveling Europe.   Something we have never done without the kids. I figured we would stay in the U.S. and do Martha's Vineyard but John said: "It's our 20th think Bigger!!"  So I did. We left for Amsterdam on Wednesday, 23 of August to spend a few days there before taking a flight to Basel, Switzerland.  From there we had scheduled a 7-day cruise down the Rhine stopping in France and Germany along the way.   Talk about romantic and a pampered vacation. Something cute about John is that he doesn't know how to dres...