After a long day in transit I arrived in Wales on Wednesday night. It has been lovely seeing the Celtic rellies again. I have been sleeping in until 9.00am each morning which is great after 3 weeks of getting up at 6.30-7.00am each day. We drove out to Hay on Wye yesterday afternoon through beautiful green Welsh countryside. I visited several bookshops and managed to get four Chalet School titles - I now just have 2 to go to complete my full (unabridged) collection. We are all going out to dinner this evening and I am going to Bristol to stay with my cousin for a few days. She is on holidays and has suggested we do a few local trips around Bristol. I feel a bit touristed out after the cruise so that sounds wonderful.

Prague

After a long 8 hour bus trip to Prague, most of us were tired out and it was not really the way I would choose to spend my birthday. I would prefer to fly! Prague is a very beautiful city but I felt it didn't quite match Budapest. We had a lovely hotel room which did help but we probably didn't make the best of our time there. We did a trip out to the Terezin Concentration Camp about an hour out of Prague. The Camp has been very well preserved and our excellent guide showed us through the buildings where you could see the kind of dreadful life the people interred there led. It was very sobering viewing. Then we were taken to the Terezin Museum where there was a fabulous exhibition showing the Terezin Jewish Ghetto. The Nazis decided to make Terezin a Jewish ghetto and expelled all the residents of Terezin to make it happen. During the war, over 135,000 people lived in the ghetto and were gradually sent away to be exterminated. A room displaying the poetry and art of the children of the ghetto was very moving.

The cruise

Yes a thousand apologies butI am now in Wales! The Internet on the ship seemed to be fully booked all the time and quite frankly I wanted to look at the scenery rather than be on the Internet. The cruise director kept kicking my travelling companion off the Internet telling her to go and look at another castle! We had a wonderful time - I particularly enjoyed Wurzburg where we toured an amazing Prince Bishop's palace - the stucco ceilings, marble floors and Mirror Gallery were amazing. Passau was a lovel little Austrian town with a magnificent Baroque Cathedral. In Vienna, I visited the Hofburg Palace - this contains three museums. The Silver Museum contained the silverware, glassware and porcelain of the Hapsburgs who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire - it was mind boggling with porcelain from across Europe. Then there was an exhibition on the life of Sisi, Elisabeth of Bavaria, who led a somewhat adventuress life having married the Duke at age 16. She was assassinated in 1898 in Geneva. And then there were the Imperial Rooms which were just sumptuous. I naturally did a little shopping at Swaroski. We went through a total of 68 locks during the 15 days - these were works of art. Some of the locks were 25 metres and it could take an hour or so to go through. Our 68th lock slowed our arrival into Budapest due to a huge storm. The waves on the Danube were so high they kept coming in over the lock wall and filling it with water again. We arrived late into Budapest and had a shortened city tour but what a view from Fisherman's Wharf over the river to the city and the magnificent Parliament buildings. We had a night cruise after dinner which showed the city lights off to great affect.