Köln - Blogged by N8

If it seems like I'm suddenly doing a lot of traveling, it's because I am! I have committed myself to my work so much since I first got here that I didn't have time to tour a little bit of Europe before returning home.

On July 5th and 6th, I took a couple days to tour the beautiful city of Cologne (Köln), Germany.

We started our tour with a visit to the city's Hard Rock Cafe. I know, I know...




Well, we had a few calories to burn right after lunch, so we went to the main attraction in town which is the Cathedral.



In the basement, you can pay €2,50 to climb all the way to the top. You get into a spiral staircase and climb, and climb, and CLIMB! It seems like you are climbing forever because you can't see where your destination is and by the time you reach the top your legs are on FIRE! When you get to the top you are 157 meters up, which is 515.09 feet. It is really up there. We stopped at the bell tower, which is about two-thirds of the way up and waited for the bells to chime. I jumped so high when they did ring, it was so loud!





Here are some pictures that I took from the top of the cathedral.







After that, we climbed down another LONG spiral staircase. You just go down, and down, and down in the same direction. It's really funny because when you get to the bottom, you've got a pretty serious case of vertigo. You walk out of the tunnel pretty dizzy. I stood at the bottom and watched everyone walk away all funny. Ha-ha, cheap entertainment...



We went outside and snapped some pictures of the surroundings. We came across a man that was playing chess for money. I watched him play two games and he won both of them really easily.



Here are some more pictures of the outside of the Cathedral.







We walked over to a really neat bridge coming out of the train station that crossed the Rhine. All along the fence were thousands of pad locks locked to it. A lot of them had people's names on them and they had them in all sorts of shapes and sizes.





Everything in Cologne pretty much closed down before 7pm, so we just decided to go to our hotel and get to bed early so that we could tackle a lot the next day.

We started our morning with a Rhine River Cruise. Here's myself enjoying an "Apfelschörle" on the boat.



Here are some pictures I took along the way.







After that we took a gondola lift ride over the Rhine River. It was really fun. Here's me inside our gondola enjoying the ride.



Here are some more pictures I took during the ride.







That was the end of our trip. Unfortunately, my travel buddy Tech Sergeant D had to get back home so he could pack his bags. He left the next day to go back to the States. It was a fun "going away" trip for him.