All onboard the… France!

We left Salzburg in the morning and drove towards Passau, through a charming countryside. While we got lost at one of those typical German detours, called “Umleitung”, we still managed to get to our cruise boat with time to spare.

Our plan was to cruise the beautiful blue Danube. We embarked mid-afternoon, were shown our tiny cabins and had a welcome drink as we met the entire crew of the “France” a river-cruise boat owned by a French cruise company from Strasbourg, and mostly populated as you’d guess it with French speaking guests, made of half French and half French-Canadians.

What was stunning was the passengers’ average age which was well within 70 years of age. Most of the passengers were part of two large groups, one from a promotion of the “Art & Metiers” school and the other was the group from Quebec along with their guide.

The independent travelers that we were stuck a bit like sore thumbs on the ship and without asking much about our likes and dislikes, we were summarily paired up with Serge and Annick, an older French couple and did our utmost to make the coupling work and did our best to enjoy our first meal together.

The only bad news was that the narrow boat was also very noisy at night which would have a disastrous impact on our terrible jet lag. The folks from New Jersey who sold us the cruise failed to warn us about our cabin location relative to the engines...