Mar 31, 2008
Starting tomorrow, you'll be receiving this blog from a river boat on the Rhine
For the next week and a half, I will be escorting 142 listeners to my Sunday radio travel show on a cruise of the Rhine, starting in Amsterdam and ending in Basel, Switzerland. Though the boat travels at something like 4 miles an hour, ordinarily a formula for boredom, it stops every day to discharge passengers at a number of historic port cities-- Cologne, Cochem, Rüdesheim, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg -- from which passengers debark to spend the entire day touring the castles, fortifications, and quaint medieval streets of these largely-medieval, largely-German (Strasbourg is half in France) cities. And because one's meals and lodgings are aboard the river boat, for which everyone has paid a very reasonable dollar price, this is supposedly an affordable method of visiting Europe that escapes the appalling current exchange rates of the Euro.
We shall see. And I'll be reporting back to you, assessing whether these wildly-popular river cruises (they're booking like mad) are an acceptable alternative to the standard methods of visiting Europe. Unlike many of the passengers, I will not be going on escorted group excursions ashore, but will simply be wandering, with Roberta, through the historic cities at which our ship, the Amadeus Symphony, stops.
The sacrifices I make for readers of this blog! The hardships I endure!
Write and read comments about this post.
We shall see. And I'll be reporting back to you, assessing whether these wildly-popular river cruises (they're booking like mad) are an acceptable alternative to the standard methods of visiting Europe. Unlike many of the passengers, I will not be going on escorted group excursions ashore, but will simply be wandering, with Roberta, through the historic cities at which our ship, the Amadeus Symphony, stops.
The sacrifices I make for readers of this blog! The hardships I endure!
Write and read comments about this post.
Fifty years ago, 
Arthur Frommer is generally acknowledged to be the nation's foremost travel authority. He is the founder of the
