Today is May 8th and we have cruised all night down the Rhine River to Cologne where we will dock in about an hour. After our arrival in  Amsterdam Julie and I went to meet up with John and Diane O'Neill at their hotel, the Amstel Intercontinental.  A beautiful hotel on the Amstel River. After a coffee we went on the canal cruise.  This one was totally different than the one I went on 2 weeks earlier.  We went more down the Amstel river and more into all of the waterways by the old town of Amsterdam, including the seven bridges going to the museum district.

From the canal cruise we went to Das Kas for lunch.  This was a beautiful greenhouse restaurant and all of the food was grown on the grounds or in their fields outside of town.  It was all organic and clean green! We all decided we are not organic or clean green.  We started with beet salad, 1 stalk each of white asparagus .  Julie asked what the dessert was and the wait server asked if we didn't want our entree which was skate (under-cooked to almost raw)on top of couscous with rhubarb. The dessert was rhubarb soup and god only knows what else which we did not eat.  So much for clean green eating.  

It was now time to go get to the dock to board the AMA Serena for  our cruise.  Boarding was a breeze and we all got settled in our staterooms.  The ship is new and this is its 3 voyage, so it is quite pristine.  The rooms are small and nothing like the brochure  They must have used a very large wide angle lens for the photos. John and Diane have very little room to  move around in. They moved into a larger room the next day. Another laugh. After our cruise briefing we had a lovely dinner then off to bed for us all.  Julie and I were exhausted from the plane ride and the time difference.

 Thursday we were off to the Gardens to see what was left of the tulips with William our driver. There were some fields still left, and in the greenhouse it was full of lilies which were absolutely gorgeous !!! The 3 girls did a brisk walk around the gardens then into the van to go to Leiden to see the University town and then we went to Outergarten for a coffee and a piece of apple pie, which was delicious !! Our ship had left Amsterdam and had come up the Amsterdam -Rhine canal to Wijk bin Durstede. We had been warned not to miss the ship and we were early and waiting on it to arrive.  Once everyone was aboard off we went to start the cruise.

We went through our first lock with 3 other boats- quite interesting with the moorings to the side of river, water going up and down and the gates being raised and lowered.  We will go through 68 locks on the cruise and travel 1160 miles on the Rhine, Main and Danube River, the Main Danube Canal. Most of the time we will be going about 10 mph down the river and it is shallow most places, only about 4-6 feet deep. We will visit 5 countries, Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary .

After a quick briefing about our journey , it was dinner time and entertainment with a violinist and guitarist and off to bed.