Tuesday, October 13, 2015
This is Monday afternoon and evening’s report. I’ll post it
when we next have Internet!
We pushed the afternoon/evening schedule back by about 40
minutes with some difficulty disembarking some early disembarking passengers
and the Dutch for their engagement. We broke one of the big chains securing the
floating dock in Mainz and did 2 180 degree turns to dock on the starboard side
and then continue sailing. I have no idea why we had to dock starboard. But
there it is.
During tea time Simona held the port talk for this evening
and Tuesday. This was not in the program and the announcement by the ACD,
Sorina was mangled and largely misunderstood so there were only about 30 people
there. The main point was that the hotel restaurant out by the Lorelei rock
listed in the daily program could not take us for dinner so we lost the
40-minute drive out and back and can walk to and from the dinner place in
Rudesheim at Rudesheimer Schloss. This is better in my mind and I gave here
thumbs up. She reacted emotionally which seemed odd. We are expected to set
sail in the morning by 4:30am and should start seeing castles of note by 6:30
to 7am. We’ll have to get up early I think. Simona said she would only narrate
the views on the Sun Deck, Panorama Lounge and Amadeus Club. We expect to let
our Amras group off in Koblenz late in the afternoon for our walking tour which
will probably mean a bus ride to meet the boat in Cologne. Not looking forward
to that. Simona said if they could find a place where they could schedule to
pick us up along the river they would, but to expect the bus ride.
So, now we are back from dinner. Simona has quit her CD job
after years with this company and left the boat. She must have left right
before the police arrived over our hasty and evidently illegal disembarkation
of the Dutch passengers at Mainz (see above). About the same time the police
arrived a young Romanian woman named Alexandra arrived and started shouting
instructions to the passengers waiting to disembark. Sorina came over the
speakers and asked everyone to stay onboard until she asked us to leave.
Everyone followed instructions as we waited for vegetables to be loaded and
laundry to be unloaded. Then we all headed out for our respective tours.
Alexandra read from the front desk handout through our AudioVoxes as we walked.
She told us she was giving us a guided tour and we would walk the Drosselgasse
and go to the Siegfried Mechanical Music Museum. She did none of those. She
told us we could take the cable cars for 7 Euros roundtrip to Germania and she
would show us where to get tickets and board to do it. It was closed but she
didn’t even know where it was until Clay and I pointed it out to her. So, she
walked us up an alley and lucked into a Kathe Wolfart shop which was open and
she suggested people shop with free time and meet back at 6:50pm. That gave her
20 minutes to guide people to Drosselgasse and find the now closed Siegfried to
find out if they would reopen specially for us. Then she turned the wrong way
and walked everyone a couple of blocks uphill to a parking lot before the
vineyards start. I knew she was going the wrong way once we started up because
I had a map and I’d been here before. I am certain she was just lost. There was
a map on the back of her information handout the same as mine. Anyway, we went
to Drosselgasse where we saw another man on Amras and he pointed out our
restaurant. We walked back to see if Alexandra ever came back and found Sorina
looking for the group. We pointed her in the direction last seen and soon they
all came back down the hill. That is how we learned where they’d gone. We
walked down past Drosselgasse and beside Siegfried’s and boarded a little
motorized tram train with enclosed cars. It took us on a nocturnal tour through
the vineyards almost up to the Germania monument. It was hard to see out of the
glass cars in the dark but you could see the lights up and down the river
valley as well as Germania lit up. It was a shame the cable cars weren’t open
because we did that before and it would have been very cool at night. The train
took us back to where it picked us up and dropped off the Amras group and took
those who wanted a ride back to the boat. People could stay in town on their
own and walk back when they wanted. We walked about halfway down and ate at
Rudesheimer Schloss. It was hot, loud and crowded in there. It is the same place
we had a great meal for lunch in 2003. This wasn’t as good, but it was OK. We
had potato soup, chicken breast stuffed with grapes and apples with potatoes,
Rudesheimer coffee and cherry ragout with vanilla ice cream. They were closing
down as we left. The whole town seemed to be closing down around 10pm as we
walked back to the boat. The boat had moved a bit and was harder to find in the
dark. They were at the same pier but another boat was shore side and we were
moored on the outside. Sorina was outside waiting for people and saw us aboard.
She said that she would prepare tomorrow’s program after we
returned and they would be delivered overnight under our doors. It is unclear
what exactly will happen after the Romantic Rhine Valley sailing early in the morning.
It sounded like you had to disembark in Koblenz to take an hour or 2 walking
tour and that in order to take the Cologne tour that you had to ride the bus
from Koblenz to Cologne. I had been planning to skip Koblenz but I don’t know
if I want to skip Cologne too. Probably I do! We spent a day and a night in
Cologne in 2003 and I think we did all we wanted to do. I’ll have to wait to
see the program and hope for a port talk to get enough information to help make
a good decision. Alexandra said she would be the one narrating our morning
scenic sailing. Sorina said she would. Alexandra did no work on tomorrow’s
program while Sorina was out with us at dinner. I am afraid that neither of
these nice Romania women are qualified or experienced enough to fill Simona’s
shoes. I don’t know what is going on but Sorina told us the captain was
dismissed yesterday. That was the 1st captain. The 2nd
captain hasn’t been seen by any of us and we assume he is off the boat as well.
The hotel manager said the captains had left on holiday. Sorina told us she had
to hold us on the boat because originally we were supposed to have a little
train transfer to Drosselgasse, but as we were ready to leave the operator
called her phone and told her the corporate office had canceled the tour. She
said she had to call the operator back and scheduled the better tour that we
got instead and that was the reason for the delay and the random walk with
Alexandra. I don’t know what is going on, but the delayed schedule should be
all the drama we need without all these extra shenanigans. We will be lucky to
get to Amsterdam in time for our train transfers to Paris. Whatever happens, it will soon be over and
we’ll be someone else’s problem for a week but still Amras’ to handle. Fingers
crossed the worst will be over when we leave Silver II.
The daily program was delivered overnight. There was only
partial information in it and Alexandra kept contradicting it in her
announcements. There were partial and mostly incomprehensible announcements
during the morning’s Romantic Rhine scenic sailing. That is all on Amadeus
Cruises. The low visibility was no one’s fault! No sooner did we start sailing
and the sun begin to rise than clouds starting sinking down the hillsides and
mist started rising off the Rhine and soon there were times when almost nothing
could be seen, like at the Lorelei rock. All anyone could do was laugh. If
Simona hadn’t already quit this would have finished her that she worked so hard
to get this scenic sailing stretch into the program and for it to be pointless.
About 10am the ship docked in Koblenz and let off touring
passengers and independent tourers for Koblenz and the 1.5 hour bus ride to
Cologne. Clay went and I stayed onboard. It was really cold today and I just
couldn’t face the discomfort for the annoyance of short badly done tours and a
long bus ride. They were paying everyone who took either tour 15 Euros in cash
on the bus ride but I still wouldn’t go. When Clay got back he told me I had
made the right decision because Cologne was a cluster cuss. What the guides in
Koblenz thought was a 2 hour tour turned into 1 hour and they race walked them
through the route before loading them in buses. They got to Cologne a little
after 1pm. They all had their 15 Euros to get lunch now, but there was no time
scheduled to have it. They met the guides who had been hired to guide from 11am
to 2pm. They were paid for the time they had been there waiting and didn’t
really care if they just walked them to a restaurant. So, they did after a 20
minute potty stop. Lunch took an hour. Finally the guides agreed to stay and take
a group who said they could and would walk fast on about a 1 hour race around the
cathedral with 10 minutes at the end to enter without her since she wasn’t
licensed. The slow walkers were just led to the cathedral where their guide
couldn’t enter either. Then Sorina and Alexandra wanted the guides to walk them
to the dock, but they guides explained that the dock they were assigned was so
far from the cathedral as to be off the map. It looked about 2km when we were
docked. I was glad I stayed on and got some more but not a lot of scenic
cruising in a stretch I hadn’t cruised before and got a good nap.
Unfortunately, I decided to go to lunch onboard. That was a mistake and I
should have known better. I had an apple I could have eaten by myself in
Panorama Lounge after the classical quartet concert but I had read the menu and
there was a beef in horseradish sauce dish as a main and a plum pancake dessert
that sounded good so I went. We have not eaten in the restaurant for lunch
because we feared a 2-hour lunch and we were right. But today they had no
buffet in Panorama. There were probably only 2 dozen diners. The lunch they
serve is a hybrid between self-service buffet and table ordering. Everything is
on the menu but the soup, salad and appetizers are on the buffet and you order
the main and dessert at the table. The problem is that even if you only want
main and dessert, you have to wait for it. But, if you aren’t there when the
room opens and put in your order then they won’t take it anyway. So, you have
to sit in there the whole time. This is exactly what many of these cruisers
came for and they wouldn’t change it. I told a new waiter when he brought a
bread basket to me that I would be alone and didn’t want any bread so he took
it away. He told my usual waiter who then stopped a British woman entering
alone to find out if her party was joining her. They were not, they had gone
ashore. They asked her in front of me (without asking me, btw) if she would sit
at my table with me instead of at hers alone. She reluctantly agreed. Then she
had a salad after she went to the headwaiter about the absence of a bread
basket. When the waiter got in trouble I had to intervene and accept the blame
as I had believed I was dining alone! Then she had soup. Fortunately she
skipped appetizers but we still sat for a long time before the main course and then
for dessert. It was a nearly 2-hour meal. Everyone within earshot of me spent
that time complaining about how bad an experience this has been. I explained to
my dining companion what a really bad river cruise was like. 3 nights out of 30
onboard a boat and abandoned in Vienna 2 weeks early to find your own way. This
still seems like a success to me. It may have finally cured us of river
cruising though. Certainly I think we have gotten European river cruising out
of our systems!
We are stopping now for a technical stop to disembark the
Dutch group after their early dinner and their evening at some theater. I have
no idea where we are picking them up again. Perhaps they will drive on to
Amsterdam. Whoever sold this group this cruise did all of us a serious
disservice and only compounded the troubles. If the Dutch group wanted to
charter and control and take over a boat, then they should have chartered the whole
boat. Whoever booked a large group and promised them control of the boat
cheated us and the staff and crew and most importantly the Dutch group
themselves. Badly done.
We got our laundry back today on schedule. I think that went
OK. I put it away with a cursory look and the form didn’t allow you to keep a
copy of the inventory so I have no idea if we got back everything Clay sent
out. We’ll assume it’s okay until we find otherwise.
Tonight is Pirates Dinner. They already had some of the vacant
tables set as if they’d been vandalized or set by pirates. It was funny last
time but I am sure those who had not been to a pirate dinner onboard yet had to
be mystified. If I can get online I will
post this now with the assumption that I won’t write about dinner. Tomorrow we
should arrive in Amsterdam for a final 4 hour walking and canal boat tour
followed by lunch onboard, a free afternoon and a final dinner. The final
documents say that dinner will be followed by a performance by a Dutch shanty
choir. We’ll see.
