RHINE CRUISE

We came from Erfurt to Rudesheim am Rhine and stayed a couple of nights there. We booked a cruise boat up the Rhine which crossed the river to Bingen and went up as far as St Goar.

This is a cruise that I have in the past just dropped my passengers off and driven up the side of the river on the Bingen side to St Goar and picked them up so it is the first time I have actually been on a boat there.

A lot of castles enroute on the hills of almost every little town and when at St Goar we had a wander about and had lunch there. Schnitzel and chips of course.

From there a bit of a walk to the station to take the train back to Bingen. A small issue was the ticket machine at the station was not working. My phone was not getting data to book the train. Eventually after finding I had data off I got my tickets on line and off we went but it did cost us some time.

We got to Bingen and had a long but nice walk from the station to the car ferry to go back over to Rudesheim am Rhine. Once we were across it was an even longer walk from there back into town and back to our hotel.

The hotel was nice but interesting, it had a tiny bathroom about the size of an airline toilet space but the included breakfast more than made up for it. The car parking was about a km away and not cheap. When we did drive to the hotel we ended up on a tiny cobble stone street and it seemed we were lost yet again but nope, all was good. Quite a hill from the hotel down to the waterfront which we did do a couple of times.

From Rudesheim we drove down what is described as the Romantic Road, however, the waeather was not so good so any towns we wanted to stop and look around got bypassed. We ended up going as far as Augsburg and then continued on the following day down the rest of the Romantic Road as far as Fussen. The famous fairytale castle Neuschwanstein, built by the mad King Ludwig II very near to Fussen to which I have been many times back with Top Deck trips.

From there a short drive to Salzburg, Austria and just before the border stopped at a services to pickup a Vignette for the car which covers toll roads in Austria.

The services had nice metal t-spoons with the coffees we got and one magically jumped into my bag, which came in handy a few times later for coffee in our rooms. It was considerably better than the plastic and wooden spoons we had with us.