In Spring of 1997 I received a mailing from a cruise travel agency that gave a glowing picture of a cruise up the Danube. It was so enticing that I decided to buy it. I told my sons I was spending their inheritance. Both said, "Great".

The program started at Budapest, Hungary. The brochure said Budapest is the Paris of East Europe. The only trouble is that after so many years of coal burning the beautiful buildings are almost universally shrouded with black, black dirt. The fact that they were built of sandstone makes cleaning almost impossible. It will almost certainly be years before the city can return to its former glory. They are trying but, being a very poor country, it makes a tough job even tougher.

From Budapest we went to Vienna by bus. Here the buildings were in far better condition. There were a few blackened buildings, but the majority were beautiful. The thing that impressed me was the hideous inflation. I walked around downtown and the one thing that caught my attention was the pair of men's shoes that by my reckoning was $450 American dollars. I wonder about their pay scales in order to buy this merchandise.

At Vienna we boarded the MS Switzerland, a river ship. It is approximately 300 feet long and has two decks of cabins.

The top, or sun deck, is covered by grass cloth carpeting. There is a glass sided covering over about a third of the deck. There is a system by which they can collapse the sides and drop the top in order to get clearance to go under the bridges. There were some where there were only a few feet of clearance even with the roof collapsed and the wheelhouse dropped into its well.

The first night we stopped at a small town in Austria, Dürnstein. As we walked alongside the Danube we were about ten or fifteen feet above the river and the mud from the previous week's flood was about five feet up on the adjacent trees. A week earlier our cruise would not have been possible.

At this small town of Dürnstein there are the ruins of the castle where Richard the Lionhearted, King of England, was held captive for ransom by the Austrian Emperor for a year.

The first two days on the Danube were great. There were castles and vineyards to see. However, after that the river was quite boring. There were some places where there were a lot of swans, but mostly nothing to see.

We went through 28 locks. Those became the only breaks in the monotony. There were some very interesting bridges that we went under. But, bridges and locks were about the only things of interest for the last few days.

We stopped at a number of towns overnight and in each case took walking tours through them.

On the seventh day of the cruise we arrived at Nürnberg, the town where the war crimes trials were held. After a few hours walking around we boarded a bus for Prague, Czechoslovakia.

We stayed at a very nice hotel. The only thing strange was their restaurant was only open for breakfast and dinner. The first day I walked about half a mile in three different directions looking for a restaurant without success. I finally found a fruit stand where I bought a banana. That was my lunch.

That evening, as I was taking a shower, I had just soaped the bottom of my right foot. As I put my foot down, I was on the slight rise in the bathtub. It was as if I'd put ball bearings on the bottom of my foot. I slipped and crashed on the tile floor. I landed on my head and back. I'm embarrassed to say that my head didn't hurt at all. My back was a different story, it hurt like the very devil.

I had bought and paid $395 for an Amsterdam three day extension which I had to forego plus it cost me an extra $150 to get my flight changed to go home early.

My little wife, somehow, knew that you take washcloths when you go to Europe, but she hadn't got the message to me. We had gone to Europe a few years before and she had taken washcloths for us. If I ever go again, I'll know.