Wednesday, May 16 - Bacharach Germany and Rhine River cruise

 We genuinely like the people who are with us on our tour.  We're seeing really great views of the most beautiful countryside, and we're touring very interesting sites and learning of the history of little places that most of us haven't heard of before.  But one of the great things about our trip is the people that we are becoming friends with.  I don't think that folks generally take trips like this with the objective of making friends, but that's what we are doing.  And we won't be surprised to find that some of these folks may be friends for much longer than the three weeks we spend together.

Bacharach is a beautiful old city with much history.  All these places are.  But the beauty we see here is something we don't see frequently in the US.  Old streets walked by kids leaving for school in the morning.  Vineyards on the sides of very tall and steep hills.  Buildings three or four times as old as our home country.  Just a very different kind of beauty.  The image below is from our window looking up to the hills behind our hotel.  After breakfast, it was out for a walking tour of this small city.

The view below is the busy street in front of our hotel.  You do need to watch for cars as they occasionally come down the streets.  But it's certainly safe to play here or walk down the middle of many of these roads.

Many of the homes have towers or huge wooden doors, or other interesting architectural items that give character both to the home and to the overall feel of the city.

In this very small town, we found also very small streets and very small alleyways.  Single file was the way we had to get from one street to another between these buildings.

Our local guide Thomas took us through the city and up onto the side of the mountain we could see from our hotel room window.  This view behind us is of the main church building in the city and the remains of another up on the hill behind the other.

The view below is essentially the same view as above, except that we have climbed further up the hill and now the Rhine is also in view behind the city.

This is a gate in the old city wall.  We were told by a different guide later in the day that the mortar used in the construction of castle and city walls was very strong as it was made with (among other things), the unusable remains of animals and fish which had been caught and used for food.  The unusable parts were tossed into huge vats and kept for a long time and then mixed with other contents to make this really good mortar which is still holding all this rock together in the walls and castles we saw.

The pretzel below is not the most photogenic of pretzels.  Of course, he can't help it that someone was so hungry they started tearing him apart to eat him before they had the idea to photograph such a lovely sample of German bread!

The view of the Rhine River below was taken from beside Castle Rhinefelz which sits high atop one of the hills outside of St. Goar .  We were told that the Rhine still handles more tonnage than any other river in the world - more than that Mississippi, more than the Yangtze in China.  It's beautiful from this height.

This is a view of St. Goar (properly said with two syllables "Go-Ar").  Janice and I were with a smaller part of our group who walked up, along a nice trail through the woods to the right, to get to Castle Rhinefelz.  It was a beautiful walk, though sometimes Janice had to pull me along.

In the image below, you can see the Rhine through on of the many openings in the castle wall.

It rained on us as we began our Rhine River cruise, but it soon stopped and was a beautiful day until it started raining again and then it stopped and was again a beautiful day.  We took many photos today - almost 300!  Many of those were taken from the boat, but the views, though very clear to us just really are not done justice in the photos we took.  Things just look so far away in the photos, but with the movement of the boat, we could see so much which these images are not showing to you.

So, our cruise on the Rhine ended at the dock in front of the town of Bacharach and we were back in the beautiful town we called home for two days.  Then it was time to be off for our evening meal with a dozen of our new friends!