'New Year's Eve 2017'
'On The Rhine Princess'
For the 4th year in a row we went on our traditional New Year's Eve cruise on the Rhine with Leger on the Rhine Princess. This has never let us down and this year was no exception, in fact by common consent this year was the best yet. We met up with our good friends Nick and Olwen, Marion and Ed, Gayner and Jean and after a couple of years gap it was great to see Mark and Michelle (my fellow Spurs supporters) again; the only one missing from our group from 2014 was Hilda (inset right) whom we befriended then and still writes to Jane, but was sadly not strong enough to make the journey by herself this year. Of course we had our regular drivers John and Tony and also Pete and Sandra were driving one of the other coaches; their daughter Jade and her boyfriend travelled over on our coach. We all felt this was like a family affair with so many good friends on the holiday with us.
We thought that this might be one year too many as we have seen the places we were going to visit so many times but how wrong could we be!! It turned into one long party from start to finish. It helps that the atmosphere on this boat is so great and that the staff are always very welcoming; in addition the food is consistently excellent and this year we had an excellent cocktail waiter, Kennid.
Our group had already agreed before the trip to dress up for the night before NY Eve and the theme was Egypt; the photos show us all in our costumes. We proceeded to work our way through the cocktail menu, a long standing tradition for us now, Planters Punch, Long Island Iced Tea, Pina Colada, Margaritas, you name it, we've drunk it. Our objective is to sample every cocktail on the menu, a somewhat ambitious challenge maybe, but a challenge nevertheless that we were forced to accept. We may not have achieved this individually but collectively I think we may have been successfull, suffice to say that they ran out of some of the ingredients before the end of the trip.
During the day before NY Eve, we travelled upstream to Oberwesel where we took the coach to Rudesheim to visit the Drosselgasse, a tradition of ours, where we go to the Wirtshaus Hannelore International hotel for one of the famous Rudesheim coffees. I have described this in previous trip reports but in brief this is like an Irish whisky but made with Ansbach brandy; the hotel have a regular band who last year captured our imagination with their rendition of Smokie's world-wide hit 'Living Next Door to Alice'....Alice, who the f*** is Alice. Unfortunately they didn't sing it this time but great fun anyway. There is also a very interesting gents toilet with brightly coloured china and some very old fashioned tiles (a bit 50's picture postcard, if you know what I mean!!).
We always like to dress smartly in our tuxedos and dresses (well whatever turns you on!!) and this year was no exception but we added a bit of mystery by wearing masks which we bought especially for the evening. After another excellent meal dished up by the staff we proceeded to the lounge and started what turned out to be a fantastic evening of drink, fun and dancing to the resident musician, 'Jaro'. One of the traditions on this trip is to celebrate both British and European NY's with the first celebration at 12 EU time including cocktails on deck and the most fantastic firework display your likely to see anywhere short of going to one of the big cities like Sydney or London. The second celebration is at 12 British time (1pm in Koblenz) and features traditional Auld Lang Syne and the Hokey Cokey.
The spectacular firework display was even better this year aided by a clear sky and relative warmth outside. Everywhere you looked, in a 360deg circle, there were fireworks being let off continuously for around 50 minutes; most of these displays appeared to be private, not public. The boat is moored by the quay and there were people pouring down from the nearby town to let off fireworks at random over the water; this was decidedly risky as fireworks were going off in all directions and with the PC brigade at home would probably not be allowed. Anyway I didn't see any boats catch fire and only the odd ambulance racing along the quay followed by a fire-engine (only kidding).
Leger organise a wine tasting trip on New Year's Day but as we have been before we gave this a miss and headed for the cable car at the confluence of the Mosel and Rhine rivers to take us up to the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress on the top of the hill at the other side of the Rhine. It was such a nice day, and we've been to the fortress before, that we decided to go for a walk in the Festungspark which helped to clear away the cobwebs from the previous nights celebrations. We returned to the boat for a leisurely cruise back to Bonn where we moored overnight before leaving the next day to travel back to Calais and home.
We arrived home on the 2nd Jan and by common consensus we all agreed that the holiday was fantastic and that we should all book again for next year. At 10am on the 3rd, I rang Leger and booked for the two of us with a cabin upgrade to the top deck (as this year). By 10.30 we learned that all top cabins had been taken due to the heavy demand from this year's customers to re-book. We were lucky and it just goes to show how popular this trip has proved to be. We will have another fancy dress theme for this year (Disney has been proposed) and would welcome all guests to participate if they get this message.
Without wishing our lives away we can't wait for New Year 2018. In the meantime (so long to wait) thank you to all on board for a wonderful holiday and we wish you all a Happy and Healthy 2018....Kind Regards Mike and Jane
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