It was a great trip and it had a different feel and a very different rhythm than others we've been on. I have empirical evidence that the trip was good - I gained 9 to 10 pounds. and I took about 1000 pictures. This sounds like I saw everything through my camera lens, but I was a lightweight compared to a very pleasant and mostly-sane psychotherapist and veteran/survivor of 100+ Grateful Dead concerts, Michael, we met who came prepared to take 3,000 pictures. Besides, it is clear no camera got between me and the food and beverage.

When you are feasting on a steady diet of visual and cultural desserts, it gets hard to pick out the best. I suppose I preferred the small medieval towns like tiny Miltenberg, Wertheim, Rothenberg, and Nuremberg to the larger places like Vienna and Budapest.

Alas, poor Budapest - while it has many great sites, the city has not yet shed the heavy gray veneer left by Nazi and Soviet occupation. The pervasive graffiti is sad to see. We took the waters in Budapest. (I.e., We went to one of the baths.) It was an experience. Sister-in-law Gay Ann, who is a nurse, viewed the place as a giant germ culture medium. Brother-in-law Charlie was put off by the inefficiency of the operation. (It took us 45 minutes to buy a ticket and get our towels.) Diane was happy to have done it -- once. I kind of liked it, but thought it was an awful lot of work compared to, say, taking a bath in the relative convenience on one's own home free from the sight of fat old men in speedos. Also, before I finished dressing I was already so hot and sweaty, I needed to bathe again.

An unique aspect of the trip was health matters: About 75 percent of the passengers were from western Australia, and on their stop in Singapore they seem to have acquired some extra baggage in the form of a respiratory virus. Most of the time being around other passengers sounded like being in a TB/bronchitis/emphysema ward.

I estimate around half or more of the passengers were sick. Out of the usual eight people with whom we dined, four got sick. Charlie got so sick he thought he might have pneumonia and had a doctor come on board to check him. One day four people on board shared a taxi to a hospital for chest X-rays. Some people weren't able to board the ship until three or four days after we departed from Amsterdam.

But it gets worse. The ship had to make a special stop to pick up a passenger who recently had had heart surgery and could not finish a bike ride on flat ground. Another person had to leave the ship for surgery to repair a detached retina. Another person fell and broke his thumb and some ribs. One person had a heart attack and left ship for heart surgery. One person died.

Except for sympathy for those who did not fare well, Diane and I felt fine the whole time.

We had a 22 mile bike ride along the Rhine that was fabulous. Our speed was actually faster than the ship's, so we stopped for lunch and at a pub. In Passau we had another bike ride, a short one along the water. We had another ride of only about three miles from Durnstein to Weissenkirchen. There was an especially beautiful section through vineyards, but shortly after that rain came down in buckets. We found a pub/bar and the four of us got in before getting very wet. Eventually we had 22 progressively wetter people in there with us including Jack and Anthea who looked like they were too late for a rest stop. A third ride was in Vienna.

Of course, the trip was not just a sequence of cities. Cruising and seeing the sites on the Rhine and the Danube was great, and making new friends like Wayne and Lynn from Australia added a lot to the experience.

Because the ship was small (only 150 passengers), I expected the on-board entertainment to be kind of hokey, but it turned out to be excellent, by far the best I have seen on any ship.

And with this report, I've really only given you a surface view of the trip.