Viking River Cruise Recap #2 - Beyla is boss, Martin Luther's stomping grounds and we get really excited about a bird...

Welcome to day 2! Where we finally get to the boat and get some bad news. (Again, all pictures are either mine or Quinn's - probably Quinn's - so please ask permission for use)

 So, from Potsdam we arrived in  Magdeburg, where our boat is docked. Originally this was supposed to just be a place where we hopped on the boat and then got on our merry way. This was not the case. But let's look at pretty boat pictures and then get to that hullabaloo.

Our room is the first to the left of the blank space on the lower level. It was a convenient spot to be!

Bathroom with a surprising amount of storage!

Beds had storage beneath where the suitcases fit perfectly!

That counter was never that clean again!

Window was much bigger than we'd thought it'd be!

View out the window in Magdeburg. Perfect for peeping on the activities on the gangplank!

So I will sum up the hullabaloo in the most efficient way I know. The water in the Elbe was too low and our boat could only move a little bit in each direction, nowhere near the length needed to get to even our first stop on the tour, let alone anything after that. We were only supposed to be in Magdeburg for barely an evening but we ended up being there for 4 days. What was supposed to happen is that we travel down the river everyday, get off the boat, do our thing, get on the boat continue traveling. What happened for the first 4 days was: get off the boat, load into a motorcoach, drive anywhere between an hour and 2 hours to the town we were supposed to be in, spend the day there, get back in the motor coach, drive back, sleep on the boat. I'm a girl who doesn't like long road trips, and get's carsick on windy roads so this was not the greatest of news. However, we all sucked it up, made the best of it and desperately prayed for rain. Which, who wants rain on their vacation right?

So the first stop on the tour was Wittenberg (?, yes...pretty sure).So, being Lutheran it was pretty neat to be in the place where Martin Luther did most of his work. We walked through his house, saw the first known copy of "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", his personal bedside prayer book and the table where he did the translations of the Bible in to German. We also ate a huge lunch with delicious beer in an adorable beer garden.

Table I mentioned...

Mighty Fortress I mentioned...

We regret not buying/taking/acquiring in some way this glass. Next time!

So the next day was the Worlitz Gardens. They're famous for being the first English style garden in Germany. It wasn't quite what we were expecting. We were thinking manicured flower beds like in Potsdam, but it was more like a more natural park with swans and statues and bridges. It was pretty it just wasn't what we were expecting. We also went on a gondola ride, which was one guy rowing a little boat of about 20 of us, while the scenery was pretty it was a little weird.

The swans and their little babies were a hit!

Love this one!

Water lilies!

They had to evenly distribute the weight on the boat and so we all got shuffled around. But that just meant that I was in position to model with the rhododendrons that everyone was going on about!

We might have papparazzied the swans a little bit but look how gorgeous!

Yep, gondola.