Another one of those early, early mornings – which seem to be getting even earlier as we go along. We were up at 4:30 this time, and left the house by 6:00 for a two-hour drive to Mainz, where we caught the MS Loreley for a leisurely cruise down the Rhine. We found a spot on the sundeck (sonnendeck) on the starboard side. It was bright and sunny but painfully chilly until around 11:00, when it began to warm up considerably. At various points, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
st_darwin and I wandered inside to warm up and attempt to order something breakfasty, since I was planning on drinking beer, and beer without breakfast on a boat is a recipe for disaster. One pfannkuchen later, I was ready to face the rest of the day. We got off the boat at a tiny village called St. Goar, and had lunch at a pizzeria/Italian food joint with the unlikely Spanish name of Corazon. The streets of St. Goar were narrow and cute, pretty much what you expect from a small German village along the Rhine. In the window of one pharmacy (apotheke) was a mannequin decked out in all their various support and orthopedic garments – a rib wrap, patellar-support kneepads, and a surgical face mask; I'm sure they were trying to advertise the array of medical garments on sale but the overall effect was somewhat more fetishy in tone. It was a little jarring. And even in a small German town there was a Birkenstock shop. Between Mainz and St. Goar, we floated past Wiesbaden, Eltville, Rüdesheim, Bingen (former home of Hildegarde), Assmannshausen, Lorch, Bacharach, Kaub and Oberwesel, as well as the legendary Loreley rock, where it is said that the song of a beautiful maiden used to drive sailors to steer their ships onto the rock. Either that or it's a treacherous part of the river and the sailors weren't very good. Which one seems more likely to you?
We caught a different boat (the MS Asbach) on the way back and sat inside.
Random observations from a day on the Rhine: There are a ridiculous number of castles along the banks of the Rhine, in various stages of repair, from fully revamped and being used as a hotel, to crumbling ruin open to the elements. Phil Collins is surprisingly, maybe even disturbingly, popular here; we heard three of his songs today. The Rhine is one amazingly busy river. On the way downriver, we saw dozens of barges laden down with cargo ranging from garbage to coal. Most of these barges have cars aboard them, on the back, presumably so the crew can get off at ports and go on day trips. On the way upriver, we saw many empty barges, floating very high in the water. One of the barges we saw on the way up was a black barge with red contrast, and the name Soprano, in the same font as the show title, complete with the pistol-R; it didn't seem to be flying a flag of origin, and we did wonder what was up with that, but decided it was probably best to mind our business. On the way downriver, we saw a jeep driving/sailing upriver, in the middle of the Rhine;st_darwin got a picture. Along the way there were geese migrating – hundreds of them, it looked like – in separate clusters of flying-Vs that would overlap, birds would cross from one group to the other or change position within their original group. The geese were much quieter than Canada geese.
On the way back, SIL and I drove in the same car, which began to run short on gas, and its little "I have this much gas" meter was flipping out, telling us we had 24, 23, 22, 21, 18, 15, 12, 8, 4, 2, 10, 14, 18, 20 kilometers of gas left, all within a short period of time, starting around the time we had 22 kilometers left to reach a gas station we knew was open. We managed to make it to the gas station before that one, and put 10 Euros in the car. I needed to use the loo but all the toilets are pay here and I had no Eurochange, so I had to beg my SIL for 70 Eurocents so I could go to the bathroom. In exchange for my money, I did get a 50-cent voucher for coffee; I wonder if beverage vouchers are that petrol station's way of ensuring that they'd always have suckers paying to use the toilets.
We made it back home without further ado, but at that point, we'd all been up for 16 hours, so we pretty much tumbled into bed.
No early morning tomorrow, just a leisurely (I hope) trip to France.
st_darwin and I wandered inside to warm up and attempt to order something breakfasty, since I was planning on drinking beer, and beer without breakfast on a boat is a recipe for disaster. One pfannkuchen later, I was ready to face the rest of the day. We got off the boat at a tiny village called St. Goar, and had lunch at a pizzeria/Italian food joint with the unlikely Spanish name of Corazon. The streets of St. Goar were narrow and cute, pretty much what you expect from a small German village along the Rhine. In the window of one pharmacy (apotheke) was a mannequin decked out in all their various support and orthopedic garments – a rib wrap, patellar-support kneepads, and a surgical face mask; I'm sure they were trying to advertise the array of medical garments on sale but the overall effect was somewhat more fetishy in tone. It was a little jarring. And even in a small German town there was a Birkenstock shop. Between Mainz and St. Goar, we floated past Wiesbaden, Eltville, Rüdesheim, Bingen (former home of Hildegarde), Assmannshausen, Lorch, Bacharach, Kaub and Oberwesel, as well as the legendary Loreley rock, where it is said that the song of a beautiful maiden used to drive sailors to steer their ships onto the rock. Either that or it's a treacherous part of the river and the sailors weren't very good. Which one seems more likely to you? We caught a different boat (the MS Asbach) on the way back and sat inside.
Random observations from a day on the Rhine: There are a ridiculous number of castles along the banks of the Rhine, in various stages of repair, from fully revamped and being used as a hotel, to crumbling ruin open to the elements. Phil Collins is surprisingly, maybe even disturbingly, popular here; we heard three of his songs today. The Rhine is one amazingly busy river. On the way downriver, we saw dozens of barges laden down with cargo ranging from garbage to coal. Most of these barges have cars aboard them, on the back, presumably so the crew can get off at ports and go on day trips. On the way upriver, we saw many empty barges, floating very high in the water. One of the barges we saw on the way up was a black barge with red contrast, and the name Soprano, in the same font as the show title, complete with the pistol-R; it didn't seem to be flying a flag of origin, and we did wonder what was up with that, but decided it was probably best to mind our business. On the way downriver, we saw a jeep driving/sailing upriver, in the middle of the Rhine;
st_darwin got a picture. Along the way there were geese migrating – hundreds of them, it looked like – in separate clusters of flying-Vs that would overlap, birds would cross from one group to the other or change position within their original group. The geese were much quieter than Canada geese. On the way back, SIL and I drove in the same car, which began to run short on gas, and its little "I have this much gas" meter was flipping out, telling us we had 24, 23, 22, 21, 18, 15, 12, 8, 4, 2, 10, 14, 18, 20 kilometers of gas left, all within a short period of time, starting around the time we had 22 kilometers left to reach a gas station we knew was open. We managed to make it to the gas station before that one, and put 10 Euros in the car. I needed to use the loo but all the toilets are pay here and I had no Eurochange, so I had to beg my SIL for 70 Eurocents so I could go to the bathroom. In exchange for my money, I did get a 50-cent voucher for coffee; I wonder if beverage vouchers are that petrol station's way of ensuring that they'd always have suckers paying to use the toilets.
We made it back home without further ado, but at that point, we'd all been up for 16 hours, so we pretty much tumbled into bed.
No early morning tomorrow, just a leisurely (I hope) trip to France.
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