Rhone Valley Vinyards in April
First the Rhine
Michele and I were introduced to riverboats a couple of years ago. We went on a Rhine River cruise featuring Amsterdam and the tulip gardens of Keukenhof on the inaugural of the Avalon Artistry, which is owned by Swiss based tour giant Globus. It was an interesting introduction – we traveled fairly short distances through urbanized sections of Belgium and Holland. It made sightseeing easy. We docked in the middle of the action in Antwerp and Ghent and had only a short bus ride to Bruges and the surprisingly spectacular Keukenhof Gardens, where we found out why the tulips are such a great springtime event.
Then the Rhone
Last spring we opted for warmer weather and cruised down the Rhone from Lyon through Provence on Uniworld’s River Royale. The trip was scheduled to start a little farther north at Chalon-sur-Soane, but high waters on the Soane temporarily made that leg of the trip impossible – there wasn’t enough clearance remaining under the bridges for the ship to pass.
I’m not sure what we missed but this minor change provided the extra time for one of the highlights – lunch in French culinary capital Lyon. Our Uniworld guide recommended Le Sud, one of four Paul Bocuse operated brasseries in his home base of Lyon. Le Sud, along with Le Nord, l’Est and l’Ouest. Each restaurant specializes in a regional aspect of French cuisine as interpreted by Bocuse, acknowledged as one of the inventors of French Nouvelle Cuisine.
Off to a good start, we got a river level view of the French countryside, with stops for winery tours, a hands on visit to a truffle “farm” and some relax time to understand why Van Gogh and other 19th Century Impressionist masters gravitated to the area around Arles (for its perfect light).
This Year the Danube
The first river cruise that comes to mind for most of us is the Danube. With a little on-line research I can now say that the Danube rises in Germany’s Black Forest and touches 10 countries – Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, before entering the Black Sea. The Main-Danube canal, which joins the Main and Danube rivers, makes it possible to travel by river cruise ship from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a distance of 2200 miles, roughly the same distance as the Mississippi from Minnesota to the Gulf.
We had driven along the Danube from Vienna to Budapest a few years ago. It has, since the time of the Romans, been the border of Modern Europe. We’ll see how much that has changed. We are planning to fill in one of the gaps in our travels, from Budapest to Bucharest and the Black Sea on Tauck’s new Swiss Emerald for 12 days starting August 28.
The first attraction of this part of the world, the Balkan countries and near neighbors is the history. Tauck provided a reading list – a half dozen books and a detailed map. Mine arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and I’m about half way through it – with four weeks before we leave. A lot of the history is battles – between Catholic Western Europe, Orthodox Eastern Europe and the old Ottoman Empire based in Turkey. We’ll report back on historic battle grounds and maybe the wine regions in Hungary (pretty good reputation) and Bulgaria (supposed to be an emerging value).
