In August 2025, we took a Viking River Cruise on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It was our first river cruise and was great way to travel – so wonderful not to have to pack and unpack as we visited each port of call. The downside, of course, is that moving from city to city every day, you feel like you are only skimming the surface.
In most every port of call, a major site to visit was a church or cathedral built hundreds of years ago. The Australian couple we met on board referred to the experience as “ABC,” or “another bloody church.” In his novel “Dodsworth,” Sinclair Lewis wrote about the downside of this type of travel:
“He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a cafe till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters.”
There is wisdom in this observation. Every church we visited merited more time than we had. Still it is an overstatement to say we saw “nothing at all.”
Here are links to my posts regarding the churches we visitted:
Basel Minster, Basel, Switzerland
St. Stephen’s Minster, Breisach am Rhine, Germany
St Thomas’ Church, Strasbourg, France
Speyer Cathedral, Speyer, Germany
Basilica of St. Castor, Koblenz, Germany
The Cologne Cathedral, Cologne, Germany
Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam, Netherlands