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| Wrapping up The Mighty Rhine™ | |
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05/10/06 - The Rhine Valley, Germany (Rhine Valley & Bruges photo album) River tours, castle tours, and a big-ass phone bill, will be how we remember the Rhine Valley |
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Our Monday Rhine cruise took us from Bingen at the south end of "the Romantic Rhine" north to Braubach, where we toured Marksburg castle. The cruise itself was nice, not as overwhelmingly dramatic as the tour books may have led us to believe, but a lovely boat ride in (yet more) beautiful weather. In addition to the thousand plus-year-old castles dotting the shore, the steep banks include numerous vineyards which were fairly barren this time of year. We sampled many-a-Rhine-wine during our short stay in Germany (mostly Riesling), and found them all to be pretty good, with none really standing out.
Marksburg castle is the only castle that you can tour which is in the same medieval state as when it was in its prime, during its use as fancy toll-booth on the Rhine. The hour long guided tour was all in German, so while we didn't get much out of the narrative, we still enjoyed seeing the inside of a real live German castle. Afterward, we managed a long and inefficient train & ferry ride back to our hotel where we had a long and wonderful meal in the elegant dining room of our castle.
After all of the tourist activities the day before, we decided to take a slow and easy pace on Tuesday. We planned little, and enjoyed simply strolling around our town of Oberwesel and the neighboring town of Bacharach. Bacharach was quite nice...the quintessential old-style-German-Rhine town. With a hilltop castle and vineyard as its backdrop, it still has the old guard towers that linked the wall around the formerly walled-city. Our afternoon of pretzel eating, Riesling-flavored ice cream sampling, wine-tasting, and climbing through the vineyard to take it all in, was the highlight of our time here on The Mighty Rhine. Things started heading downhill from there, however, as we got trapped in a torrential downpour climbing back up the hill (mountain?) on the dirt (mud?) path back to our castle. That could all be fixed though, with the showers, robes, sherry and chocolate that awaited us in our room. The real low point was Wednesday morning, when we discovered that our hotel had charged us 110 euros for our phone call to make our train reservations, after implying it would be a toll free call! Now, while 100 euros may not be much to the wealthy people of Europe, that's like $150 for us poor Americans (must the dollar continue to plummet against the Euro while we're here?!)... On that note, we're happy to leave Germany and head off to Belgium for our visit to quaint and historic Brugge.
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"The Mighty Rhine" |
