Thursday, May 5, 2011 Speyer, Germany

We had a very leisurely day.  We had the choice of leaving the ship this morning and visiting Heidelberg or staying on the ship as it sailed from Mannheim to Speyer.  We chose to stay on the boat and cruise instead of sightsee.

We had a very relaxing morning with a late breakfast, Mary read while I wrote postcards and did yesterday's blog (it takes a long time to download each picture), watched the other boats go by and after lunch we napped and walked into Speyer.

Speyer turned out to be a nice little town and not touristy at all.  They have a park along the river.  It is about a 5 minute walk along manicured paths through this lovely green park to the big church that dominates the town.  The main street leads straight away from the church.

It seemed as if the merchants were having a sidewalk sale as they had many garment racks on the sidewalks in front of their stores.   There was one store that reminded us of Bibelot in Minneapolis.  The little downtown was about 5 blocks long.  It was set up like a pedestrian mall.  There were lots of sidewalk cafes.  Most of the sidewalk cafes were full of people (Germans by the sound of their talking) just relaxing in the sun.  It was probably around 70 degrees in the sun.  There were locals wading in the river enjoying the nice day.

We came back to the boat for our evening activities and dinner.

They post the menu before dinner and lunch every day.  Each day has a different menu.  Our theme tonight was an international dinner.  If you click on the picture you can enlarge it and you can see what we were offered.  We both had the perch with ice cream for dessert.

This is a picture of the perch.  Notice the presentation.  Everything they put in front of you is very interesting.

This was our Belgium ice cream.

After dinner we took a couple of strolls on the sun deck.  It was dark and there was a little sliver of the moon.  So it has been confirmed that there is a moon in Germany!