Texture of a tile roof top in Breisach, Germany. Breisach is a fairy-talish town sitting in the middle Rhine River Valley just west of the Black Forest and east of France’s Vosges Mountains. It’s so beautiful and “old” looking that one can scarcely believe 85% of the town was destroyed in WWII.
TEXTURE: the visual or tactile surface characteristics and appearance of something. (Merriam-Webster)
Fiestahas come and gone and so has my vacation. Sigh… Both were enjoyable – though, to be honest, Fiesta was a boatload of work. Vacation was just…a boatload. Tom and I enjoyed last years river cruise so much, that we decided to do another one. This time we headed off to the Rhine River, starting in Basel, Switzerland.
Interesting fact: The Basel Airport is almost all in France. It has an exits/entrances in both France and Switzerland. It pays to know which country you’re headed to.
Tom standing on Breisach’s cobblestones. Note the pretty rebuilt homes. Beautiful.
Such delicate stonework is all over Strasbourg’s Gothic cathedral which also had to be majorly restored after WWII. In fact, the stained glass windows disappeared; Americans found them in 1945 in a German salt mine.
Texture of decorative stonework found in the partly ruined fairy-tale Heidelberg Castle in Heidelberg, Germany.
The tenor of this trip was much different than last year’s wine cruise in Bordeaux. That one was a very local vacation covering a lot less distance. It was more laid back and concentrated on the really, really excellent wines that come out of that region of France. It also gave us more time for leisure, leisure which I define at least partly as sketching and journaling. Not so much this trip. Although I managed to finish a crocheted shawl and get some reading done, we were moving too much this year. Some days there were two excursions on shore! They were interesting, but I think Tom and I are into a little more free time on vacation. Not to mention good wine.
This one’s a two-fer. Note the stonework of the castle’s facade as well as the pompom texture of the tree below. Does anyone know what kind of tree that is? It was spectacular. BTW, note that you see through those upper story windows to the sky. Yes, Heidelberg Castle has a lot of ruins about it.Couldn’t help it. Isn’t is wicked cool???
The Rhine River cruise – also by Viking– as I said, started in Basel and quickly moved into Germany. Actually, the Rhine runs right between Germany and France’s Alsace region (which is sort of German; read the history as mentioned above) for awhile, and we explored both sides. As the week progressed, we moved fully into Germany and finally into the Netherlands. We docked in Amsterdam where Tom and I spent a couple of extra nights. (After flying back to the U.S., we spent a couple of unplanned nights in San Francisco, but that’s a story for another post. As are my luggage woes.)
Okay, this is detail from afar. Look at the rows and rows of vines hanging on the hills along the Rhine. They can be so steep that vineyard workers have to tie up and kind of rappel down to work on the vines.
Marksburg Castle was a treasure trove of textures, especially as we were seeing it close-up. These succulents are part of the castle’s gardens.
Of course, I have pics to share. You’re seeing them now. Unfortunately, the camera on my phone started to crap out on this trip. I might add that this is the same phone that had over-heating issues last vacation. The difference here is that I didn’t realize how fatal the problem was till the last day – in San Francisco – when the thing shit the bed entirely. I lost some photos. 🙁 Now, I have to purchase a new phone. Did I mention that on top of a European vacation, we just paid for the hardwood floors we’re putting in? Yeah, bad timing. A phone isn’t in the budget for a bit. Luckily, Tom’s old one – the one with a malfunctioning keyboard – was still up for the photography challenge, so I’m carrying it around as an ancillary to my now unloved phone.
Even the walls were texturized!Nice woodwork in the castle’s main bedroom!
Cologne’s cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site, seen through the rained-on window of our ship. Notice how the clouds parted over the church. The heavens opened up when Tom and I were walking around Cologne earlier. Late in the afternoon, the sky cleared producing a beautiful evening.
I actually walked on this floor in the Cathedral in Cologne. Incredible mosaic.This is the exterior wall of a windmill in Kinderdijk, the Netherlands. Bricks were, maybe 4 inches long at most, the better to be able to make the rounded base of the building.Although the sandstone exterior walls of the Cologne Cathedral are black and pitted – acid rain requires that there’s constant maintenance and replacement of stone – this “texture” is actually the result of a WWII bullet.
Rain, like wind, is plentiful in the Netherlands. These are grasses that grow in the wetlands surrounding the windmills. Nineteen working windmills are in Kinderdijk, also a UNESCO World Heritage site. We were lucky enough to be able to go into one.In Amsterdam’s Flower Market there were, of course, bundles and bundles of tulips. Note the cool black ones in the backMy last photo – before the camera really, truly died – is, incongruously, of sea lions dotting rafts while they snooze. I needed to do the same after an 11-hour flight and then two extra nights in California!
So, we’ve muddled through my pics regardless. This first bunch had to do with the different textures I observed on our travels. I hope you enjoy. Give a yell if you have any questions or insights to the photos. And please share your vacations stories here too!
