My Dutch Cruise

Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Verdict on River Cruises

So, what do I think about river cruises?
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I dig 'em. The difference between a big ship cruise and a small ship cruise is the difference between boarding a train and boarding a plane. You just walk on a train, no going through layers of security, no arriving hours in advance because you don't know how long the security lines will be, no taking off your shoes and opening your bag. Getting on a big cruise ship isn't quite as bad as going to the airport, but it's a big production. Not so with a 60-suite-and-stateroom river cruise ship like the Avalon Visionary. You walk on. You walk off. The biggest delay: waiting for the crew to put down the gangplank.

The Bridge Too Far--Arnhem

If you saw or read "A Bridge Too Far," this is the bridge. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, do. (As a matter of fact, I just downloaded it to read on my flight home). And if you're ever in Arnhem, do not fail to visit the Airborne Museum, which is devoted to that battle and is located at the heart of where tens of thousands waged a battle that was truly epic in scale, tragedy and valiance.

My trip here, with an excellent guide (thank you, Avalon Waterways, the quality of the guides and the excursions shows the advantage being part of the Globus Family of brands) who had clearly steeped herself in the story of a battle that took a terrible toll, was yet another example of how travel can take you not just through space, but through time.

Dutch Scenes

Scenes from a day of exploring ...

Battling Superstition With Science

On May 8, 1774, a rare conjunction of the planets in the skies over the Netherlands meant that Mercury, Venus, Mars and the moon were clustered together. People feared they'd collide and the earth would be sucked into the sun and incinerated. A clergyman describing himself as a "devotee of truth" published a paper predicting apocalypse and despite government efforts to recall his paper, panic spread.

But, it wasn't an apocalypse and a woolcomber named Eise Eisinga knew it. Eisinga lived in the town of Franeker and demonstrated his mathematical genius at an early age. He studied Euclidean mathematics in his youth and by the time he was 18, had written three books about math, astronomy and the universe. He didn't do this in vacuum, his father had also loved math. But his father was a woolcomber and that was Eisinga's destiny as well.

Although woolcombing was his trade--and he excelled at it--he never abandoned math and astronomy. So when panic ensued over the little-understood conjunction of the planets,

Sailing Ships

On my morning run yesterday I passed the Batavia, a replica of a 17th-century sailing ship (pictured below). Later in the day, we visited the shipyard next to where the Batavia is moored, where they're working on building a replica of another 17th-century battle ship. And they're doing it the old-fashioned way: completely by hand. That means the blacksmith makes every nail that goes into the ship, sail-makers hand sew six tennis-courts worth of sail. And then we walk through the Batavia, listening to a volunteer talk about life at sea in the 17th century. In the best of times, it was a terrible trip, with 25 to 30 percent of the people on the ships dying of illness or from mutiny or pirate attacks. Ship designers built ship's interiors so that the rich passengers and officers could barricade themselves in their quarters and hold off mutinying crew or marauding pirates.

Life wasn't too great even for the rich at sea, the middle photo is essentially where they lived, ate and slept. The crew were squeezed into tighter quarters and the soldiers were squeezed into decks just four feet high. And then, of course, they'd have to squeeze in a few chickens to serve later in the voyage. If you went on these ships, you must have been desperate or shanghaied.

Compare that with my experience aboard the Visionary, the ship I'm sailing through Dutch waterways. It's an all-suite ship with floor-to-ceiling windows, L’Occitane toiletries (I promise you, you do not want to hear about the toilet experience aboard the Batavia) and a much, much better galley. When the Batavia was built, it took 1,000 men nine months. Compare that to the the 100 men it took to build the Visionary in ten months.