Now this sounds like a great way to end one’s silver-medal-winning Olympic experience: The 2012 German dressage competitors will be taking a cruise ship, not a plane, home from London.

Anabel Balkenhol (the individual competitor) and team members Kristina Sprehe, Dorothee Schneider, and Helen Langehanenberg will return home to Germany aboard the MS Deutschland, which is currently moored at South Quay, near London’s Canary Wharf. They depart London on August 13 and will arrive at Hamburg harbor on August 15, according to a London Games press release.

The four women will pair up in the two booked cabins. The arrangement is sure to feel familiar by now, as they’ve been rooming together at the Olympic Village.

I actually saw the ship a few days ago, as my Docklands Light Railway (DLR) train whisked past South Quay