Saturday December 14th, 2024

Another 2 port day. We docked about 15 minutes away from Mannheim so a short bus ride in. Mannheim is very industrial and is the home of a large John Deere tractor factory. There is also a very large chemical factory, BASF, which is so large it has it’s own railway station to get the employees from around the plant and also they bought 40,000 bicycles for the employees to use to get around and can use to come and go from work. We did a walking tour and then we were let lose to wander the Christmas market which was pretty big.

We passed by a previous palace that supposedly has 1 window more than Versailles so they could say they were the bigger palace. Today it is used for university classes and houses a museum.

Mannheim has a huge water tower in the main square. During the spring and summer months there is a nice fountain but they drain the water during the winter. During the Christmas season it is home to the Christmas market.

There were lots of food stalls and while we did not try this treat it definitely caught our eye. It is dough that is cooked over coals and there are 4 treats per bar. After cooked they powder them with your choice of sugar our cinnamon sugar and serve them warm. They smelled great but we resisted.

In the Christmas market there is a store that has lots of ornaments and wooden nutcrackers and santa and tons of nativity scenes. We were told that it would be very popular and if we wanted to go into it we needed to get in line early. We were lucky and the line was relatively short but it moved very slowly though the store, you could basically only walk single file and the line to check out was what took so long. Part of the issue was only 2 cashiers and the other issue was that people were buying all these glass ornaments that have to individually wrapped and boxed up. That consumed most of our time in there market.

We met our group and took the bus back to the boat and had lunch on board with Jeff and Bruce from the Jerold cruise. We were talking about our habits on the ship trying to figure out why our paths never really crossed. They kept pulling up pictures of who they hung out with and we were pulling up pictures and while there was a few people we recognized we traveled in different circles and we did totally different things while on board. Pretty funny when you consider there were only 550 left on for about the last month.

We arrived in our next port, Speyer Germany around 3:30. We decided to skip the walking tour and just venture out on our own. It is pretty east to find you way around town because like most of these small towns the cathedral is in the center of town.

The Speyer church with it’s massive door.

There was a choir inside practicing and the sound was excellent.

All of these towns have historic gates leading into the town. On the right is the Church in the background and there was a singer, who was pretty good, singing some Christmas songs to get you in the spirit.

We left the market around 6:00 and it was about a 20 minute walk back to the ship. The walk was nice but one thing about these small towns is no lights at night.

This was on the river down from our boat on the walk back.

We had a cocktail party for past Viking guests which was nice at 6:30 and then the port talk for Sunday was at 7pm. We had a nice dinner on board.