Located in Passau, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, is a baroque church dating back to 1688 and dedicated to Saint Stephen, Christianity’s first martyr.
The first church was built in 730 AD on the site of the current cathedral. The current cathedral is an impressive baroque structure dominating the center of Passau 328 ft. in length and was constructed from 1668 to 1693 after a fire in 1662 destroyed the previous church. That fire destroyed the entire city and seemed to have left the church standing. In thanks the city held a celebration and when firing cannons in salute the vibrations collapsed all but one exterior wall.
Passau Cathedral is home to the largest organ outside of the United States and the largest cathedral organ in the world. The organ currently has 17,774 pipes and 233 stops, all of which can be played with a five section general console in the gallery. Some portions of the organ can be controlled by a mechanical and electrical action additional console, for a total of six consoles. There are very popular daily concerts conducted in the cathedral with some by notable guest musicians. While not a concert organist, Arnold Schwarzenegger was recently allowed to play the organ and upon finishing he is reported to have exclaimed “I’ll be back.”
The cathedral also has eight large bells in the bell rooms in the north and south towers with the heaviest, weighing over eight tons.
Gateway to Alaska cruising and a departure port for cruises to Hawaii this port has much to offer visitors.
Cruising North To Alaska?
Vancouver is a major embarkation port and a gateway for many of Alaska’s cruises.
A popular gateway for many Alaska cruises, Vancouver is a great destination on its own. While it may owe much of its popularity in the cruise industry to some old and archaic U.S. law called the Jones Act and The Passenger Vessel Services Act, it deserves to be recognized as a great destination city as well. Vancouver is the largest western Canadian city with a large natural harbor and a thriving economy. Famous for a number of nearby wine regions, it has a great natural beauty and a vibrant city atmosphere.
The issue with the Jones Act/The Passenger Vessel Services Act prohibits cruise lines from picking up passengers in one U.S. port and allowing them to disembark in another U.S. port. Vancouver, Canada allows the cruise lines to avoid the problem of picking up passengers from a U.S. port.
Downtown Vancouve
Where Your Ship Dock
The cruise pier in Vancouver is called Canada Place and it is centrally located with a nice cruise terminal. Canada Place is also a convention center and community event venue so take the time to discover what’s going on inside. Just walking out of the terminal finds you in downtown with a tourist office within a couple of blocks of the pier. Only a few blocks walk to the southwest is Gastown, a popular historic district with lots of restaurants and clubs. A few blocks farther south is Vancouver’s Chinatown, which is home to a large Asian population replete with markets and excellent Chinese restaurants.
Wheelchair Accessibility
Disembarking – This port provides a modern cruise terminal with built-in provisions for passengers using wheelchairs like ramps and elevators.
Port City Characteristics – This port has a well developed wheelchair friendly infrastructure. The port area is flat or has few inclines. Intersection crosswalks have few issues with curbs or other wheelchair obstacles.
Transportation
Taxi – Taxis are common and fares average about $10 for trips within the central city. A taxi trip to the airport should cast about $30.
Gastown Steam Clock
Rapid Transit – The Canada Line is Vancouver’s rapid transit rail connecting Vancouver International Airport (YVR) to downtown Vancouver in about 30 minutes. Trains leave every few minutes and run from 5 am till after midnight. Fares run about $3.00 per trip.
For detailed information on getting from Vancouver airport to Canada Place click HERE.
Bicycles – Vancouver is a very walkable city and you will discover that many locals commute on bicycles. There are a number of rental locations not far from Canada Place. Spokes Rentals is only four blocks down the waterfront (1798 W Georgia Street).
Money – A Canadian dollar is currently about US$0.80 and unlike the Eastern Canadian cities Vancouver businesses will often insist on cash being in Canadian currency. Credit cards are welcome and ATM machines are plentiful. If you spending a day or two in Vancouver a good way to pick of Canadian currency is to use an ATM.
Cruises depart by sailing under Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge
Local Sights
Gastown and Chinatown, as mentioned above are not far from Canada Place and are a must visit. Because of the large Chinese population there are a number of restaurants featuring authentic Chinese cuisine with great dim sum. Gastown is located not far from the cruise terminal and is the old historic section of Vancouver. A great entertainment district wit lots of restaurants, bars and shops.
Entrance to Vancouver’s China Town
Vancouver Aquarium located in Stanly Park down the waterfront to the northeast about a mile from Canada Place. It is Canada’s largest and a great attraction especially if you are traveling with children.
Science World with its iconic dome was originally built for Expo ’86, and is home to a number of interactive exhibits as well as one of the world’s largest OMNIMAX theaters. It is located less than a mile and a half from Canada Place.
Capilano Suspension Bridge is a ways out of town but people from all over the world come here to experience this bridge and the natural beauty of the area. It is located in the Capilano area.
On a trip across Europe we spent some time in Austria. While walking thru Vienna’s center of town near St. Stevens Cathedral we became aware groups of young people, dressed in black coming into the square from a number of directions. It seemed odd and appeared something was going on. As several boom boxes began to play music they began to dance…
After only a few minutes it was over and the group drifted away in all directions just like they had come.
Walking away we realized it was our very first “flash mob” experience and it seemed our day had gotten a little brighter.
We weren’t aware of love locks before about a decade or so ago but now as we travel we come across collections of padlocks attached to bridges, fences and other public structures everywhere. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what was going on by all the couples names engraved on the locks. In the last five years or so it is becoming difficult to not notice these collections, they’re popping up everywhere.
For goodness sake it’s even hit our small Florida town. The weren’t there a year ago but just last month as we walked through the lake front park, there they were!
Winter Garden Park
The practice isn’t new but was virtually unheard of outside of a few cities, mostly in Eastern Europe, until recent years. Early in the twenty-first century the practice has exploded worldwide. A love lock is a padlock which lovers lock to a bridge, fence, gate or monument to symbolize their undying love. In recent years the lovers’ names or initials, and the date, are engraved on the padlock, and its key is thrown away, usually into the river under the bridge, to symbolize the couples undying love for each other.
This simple and romantic practice seems innocent enough, but more and more it’s being treated by authorities as litter or vandalism, and there can be serious costs associated with damage caused and their removal. But we’ve also learned that there are places where authorities are embracing lovelock places as a tourist attraction.
Paris
A little research will find that love padlocks date back at least 100 years to a Serbian tale of World War I. It involves the bridge Most Ljubavi or the Bridge of Love in the town of Vrnjačka Banja*. A local schoolmistress named Nada, who was from Vrnjačka Banja, fell in love with a Serbian officer named Relja. He went off to war in Greece, where he fell in love with a woman from Corfu. Heart broken Nada broke off their engagement and after some time died from heartbreak. As the tragic love story circulated, young women from Vrnjačka Banja wanted to protect their love and started writing down their names, with the names of their loves, on padlocks and attached them to the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet.
Savannah, Georgia
Ha’penny Bridge, Dublin
In Dublin there is a famous pedestrian bridge called the Ha’penny Bridge. It is one of the more famous symbols of Dublin. Nearly 200 years old (1816) it is a protected structure, but in recent years Dublin City Council have had to remove thousands of padlocks from the bridge on a regular basis. They are considered unsightly and are causing damage by chipping paint and adding considerable weight to the historic bridge. Engineers have estimated that at some point, if not removed, they could cause the bridge to collapse.
Today the key to many an Irish heart now sits at the bottom of the River Liffey where couples in love have thrown them after securing their love locks to Dublin’s historic Ha’penny Bridge. Today there is a group dedicated to breaking that bond. Shortly after the lovers have left, an expert lock-picking group arrives to tear these bonds of love apart and stop the locks from making the bridge structurally unsafe.
River walk Wurzburg, Germany
“It’s a fairly constant churn,” said Seán Nicholls, who set up the group when he was on his way to a professional lock-picking meeting. “I was heading to the meeting one day and I walked over the Ha’penny Bridge and noticed all the locks. In my mind it was defacing a city treasure. That’s kind of where the idea came from,” he said.
Dublin City Council embraced the group in the aftermath of a love-lock situation in Paris where the locks caused a section of the Pont des Arts bridge to collapse. The bridge in Paris had become famous for “love locks,” but the locks became too heavy and a two-meter segment of the bridge and railing buckled under the pressure of so many romantic symbols falling into the Seine.
Just this summer we were in Liverpool and along the waterfront – surprise! We found them in a cliffside park in Lima, Peru. From Amsterdam to Zurich and even in Asia it’s no longer a surprise to come across these obtrusive symbols of undying love.
Just recently the practice has come to America and is growing in Savannah, Boston, St. Louis and a number of other cities. Not to walk away from a business opportunity many locksmiths are now offering professional engraving on their padlocks and a number of manufacturers are offering heart shaped padlocks, likely to cause the new tradition to grow and spread even more.
Ha’penny Bridge, DublinSavannah
Are LOVELOCKS legal or prohibited?
Montevideo, Uruguay
Mt. Huangshan, China – Adding love locks? Legal: Encouraged
Brooklyn Bridge, New York – Adding love locks? Legal: No
Hohenzollern Bridge, Germany – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
Seoul Tower Seoul, South Korea – Adding love locks? Legal: Encouraged
Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, Boston United States – Adding love locks.?Legal: No
Butchers Bridge, Slovenia – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
Penang, Malysia – Adding love locks? Legal: Encouraged
Tamuning, Guam – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
Vrnjacka Banja in Serbia* – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
The Distillery District, Toronto, Canada – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
Ponte Milvio Bridge, Rome – Adding love locks? Legal: No
The Flame of Liberty, Paris – Adding love locks? Legal: No
Stab Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, St. Louis – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
Fountain of Locks, Montevideo, Uruguay – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
The Casa Di Guilietta, Verona, Italy** – Adding love locks? Legal: Yes
*This bridge “Most Ljubavi” is a pedestrian bridge known as the Bridge of Love in the town of Vrnjačka Banja and is the location where the legend of the love locks began.
**The Casa Di Guilietta is a particularly popular location for adding love locks as it is supposed to have been the home of Juliet Capulet from Shakespear’s Romeo And Juliet.
Are there any love locks near you? Let us know where and we’ll add the locations.
Grand Teton National Park is located in the northwestern Wyoming. The park covers an area of 310,000 acres centered on the Teton Range, a rugged 40-mile-long mountain range. In 1929, the park was established as a national park, and since then, it has become a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts.
The Teton Range was created by a localized geological uplift and faulting. Around 9 million years ago, the Earth’s crust began to stretch and thin in the region, causing the land to rise and form mountains. The Teton Fault, which runs along the eastern base of the range, is responsible for the steep eastern face of the mountains. Glaciers also played a significant role in shaping the range, carving out deep valleys and leaving behind moraines and other glacial features.
Join us as we visit historic treasures, natural wonders and vibrant cities set against backdrops that are endlessly changing and visually magnificent.
The Intentional Travelers 