Eau de Cologne

There was a fair bit of cruising today as we didn’t get to our firsts stop until the middle of the afternoon.

This is what we passed by…

Can someone tell me, are these nests? Bird’s nests? What sort of bird builds a nest like this? There were hundreds.

EDIT: My very knowledgable friend from Liverpool says that they might be Mistletoe!

Jenny is always concerned about people looking into the windows at us… on the boat, at home, anywhere really… I’m pretty sure people can’t see us and if they can – good luck to them.

There was no problem with this little pooch though…

There was a lot of industrial works along this stretch… not pretty, but interesting.

And we passed lots of boats like this…

Have you seen Nemo? Yep, found him!

So, while we go passed this not so pretty bit, I’ll show you some of the ship.

There are bikes you can take out at each stop…

There’s a lounge on one level and then the dining room on the level below… and an indoor, heated swimming pool. They can take the roof of if the weather is good and they also put a cover over the pool and have movie nights.

oh wait… There was one pretty bit.

To while away the afternoon we played Mah Jong. There was a little dinky travel set amongst the books, jigsaws and games.

Note the size of Jenny’s hands for scale.

The we arrived at our first stop on our Destiny Splendour Cruise – Cologne, or Koln as it’s pronounced here in Germany… the same way you would say the comedic character from The Comedy Company, Colin Carpenter’s name.

The boat docks at the X, so it’s really close to walk to everything.

It’s got a great big cathedral in the centre. I must say, I didn’t love Koln last time we were here. In fact, we tried to search what we’d written in the blog from back then (in 2010!) and I’d written nothing. Didn’t even mention that we’d been there… that’s how much we enjoyed it.

There are lot of new buildings here and I think that’s why I didn’t love it as much as I did the other old German cities…. there was none of the same oldnesss or quaintness. Well, not in the same abundance to make a big impact.