Cruise from Dusseldorf to Amsterdam preparations

After returning from my adventures in New Zealand it was head down, back to work and coping with the vagaries of a winter in Britain. Fortunately that is behind me now and with Spring upon us I am now looking forward to my short cruise from Dusseldorf to Amsterdam.

Since staying in Vienna for three weeks to attend Master classes on the piano in 1974, when I took a river trip on the Danube to Durnstein and back, I had harboured a desire to go all the way to the Black Sea on the River Danube. For years I had scoured the travel section of the newspapers and looked online, but every company stopped at Budapest. Then finally in 2017, when my daughter Susie and I were on a Fred Olsen cruise around the Baltic, there it was. Fred Olsen had hired a small boat called “Brabant” and it was going from Romania on the Black Sea to Dusseldorf. As it was an experimental first year I immediately booked Susie and me on it. It was an amazing trip, which will appear on my blog at a later date.

Brabant on the Danube Delta
Brabant in Budapest

While on that 25 day trip I asked the travel representative if there were any short trips that Susie, her daughter Emma and I could do this year, 2019 and he produced the above also called Holland in Bloom so I booked us on that immediately. Sadly things have not gone to plan