May 2, 2013

Hi!  We’ve been busy!

Wednesday May 1^st we docked in Koblenz, Germany.  We went to Marksburg to tour a 700 year old castle.  

It was difficult walking, but so worth it.  The pavement, if you can call it that is stone and a very uneven surface.  

We climbed stairs seeing the kitchen, bedroom, chapel, the torture room as well as the blacksmith’s area.  It was cold, but it didn’t rain.  

We came back to the boat and we walked around Koblenz.  We came across some sort of demonstration.  We think it had to do with Solidarity.   But here is a fun statue.

And the tulips are beautiful!

For lunch we had German food which was various sausages, sauerkraut, potato salad and loud oompa-pa music.  The food was good, especially the black forest cake for dessert!  The afternoon we relaxed and I was able to beat bc at cards twice!  Nice! 

We had signed up for an extra event, a traditional dinner in Rudesheim.  We got on the mini train and it took us to the restaurant.  The mini train was very mini and wasn’t very comfortable.  The restaurant was nice.  We had a great salad, soup and wine.  The oompa-pa music was so loud that we could hardly talk to our table mates. 

After we had our main course, bc and I left as I couldn’t stand the noise anymore.  When we left the restaurant we found ourselves in a lovely village of many quaint restaurants and shops.  We ran into some friends from our boat and they told us they had walked into the village and told us which way to go to get back to the boat.  We proceeded to walk back to the boat.   The walk through the village was so pleasant.  So much nicer than the mini train. I was just so glad to be away from that loud music!  We found the shore and a boat and asked what the name of the boat was, and it wasn’t ours.  Then we found a Viking boat, it looked just like ours.  We went to the front desk to turn in our id cards for our room keys, when a guest standing at the front desk said “You can’t be in room 209!  I’m in 209!”  We were at the wrong boat, again.  We left that boat and continued down the shore.  We found our boat, yay!  That was easy…

This morning we arrived in Mannheim.  We got on a bus and went to Heidelberg.  We went to another castle.  This one was magnificent.  We’ve been in a lot of castles in Ireland, Scotland, France and now Germany.  The Heidelberg castle took 400 years to build and is a mix of various architectures.  This castle was built for the granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots.  I remember being in the castle in Edinburgh, Scotland where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to her only child, King James.  This was his daughter who was married off to a German King.  Various wars caused lots of damage to the castle and finally in 1764 it was struck by lightning and set ablaze.  Now it is a large tourist attraction.  It is still quite impressive.

We spent a few hours in the quaint village of Heidelberg.  We had some lunch at on outdoor café and walked along the cobblestone roads and enjoyed all the shops.  It was a pleasant afternoon.

We got back to the boat around 3:30 and I took a much needed nap!  Now we are relaxing before having dinner.  We are enjoying this cruise and we’ve met some very nice people. 

We miss you and send our love, bc and gc