Today was to be the big "castle on the Rhine" experience. We arose to find a very heavy fog which resulted in not much of any castle sightings until almost 11:00 am. While in the narrow part of the river, we were also situated behind a cargo ship which was going very slow and would not speed up. This threw us off our schedule by about 30 minutes. We finally passed the cargo ship and "speed" upstream to Rudesheim. We probably were going about 5 or 6 km/hr.
Not sure which castle is shown below...it just materialized out of the fog...in a ghostly fashion.
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| Loreley Statue |
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| Loreley Rock |
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| A railroad tunnel disguised by the Nazi in WWII to resemble a castle and discourage bombings |
Fog finally starting to lift.
Lots of vineyards on the sides of very steep hills. Mostly Riesling grapes.
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| Heimburg Castle |
Next to the Sooneck Castle is a quarry which did/does supply stones to Amsterdam for their canal dikes (embankments).
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| Sooneck Castle |
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| Reichenstein Castle |
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| Church between Reichenstein and Rheinstein castles |
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| Rheinstein Castle |
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| Rudesheim |
Upon arrival at Rudesheim, we walked to the Rudesheimer Schloss for lunch. The 2017 Riesling was excellent. I recommend it. The pork was excellent. The live music was loud. The apple strudel was fattening. The German coffee was intoxicating.
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| Lunch Riesling |
Then we were off to the Siegfried's Musikkabinett...the World's second largest privately owned collection of self playing instruments. Fascinating. Found a nice gift for Megan.
Megan's gift is a music box.
Turned loose, Jean and I caught the gondola to up to the Germania statue.
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| On gondola going up |
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| On gondola going down |
We got aboard at 5:15 pm. Tomorrow, we are cruising all day. I put in about 4 miles today. Not sure what we are doing, if anything, for dinner tonight.
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