Tuesday 16 July 2013

I'm too young for river cruises (Abandon Ship! Abandon Ship!)

The cruise starts at 9 am and will get me to Bingen at 1 pm.   I’m all excited, as evident from these pictures:






At 10 am I am falling asleep. How many quaint villages and castles can one get excited about?  Some of the churches look like they were all made from the identical model set.  At 10:20 I abandon Ship in St Goar.   Just in time: about 100 English-speaking kids get on board.

The road signs say that Bingen is 28 km away. How could the boat possibly take 2.5 hours to get there?  I start cycling.  For an hour, when I reach Bacharach, the boat falls more and more behind as the river narrows and becomes difficult to navigate.  Pictures of the Lorelei and my previous boat:






 Want to collect way-fees from boats?  Build a castle in the middle of the river ;-) Kaub

I reach Bacharach at 11:30 and decide to go for lunch.  After a while I find a place with outside sitting that’s not exposed to the sun (Somehow sunshine and polluted air don’t mix; my skin starts itching). Lunch is yummy and not expensive. While the restaurant outside sitting area was deserted when I arrived, it is occupied to the last seat with a part of a bus load of tourists only 5 minutes later.  Well, fortunately not occupied; my table is only occupied by me; in German it is reasonably common that people just sit down at ‘your’ table when everything is occupied.

Bacharach has a train station and I will try to get to Bingen (or Frankfurt directly) by train. Try to is right.  I wait ½ hour for the train that takes 15 minutes to get me to Bingen.  There I wait another whole hour for a train that takes one hour to take me to Niederrad, where in turn I wait 15 minutes for the train that takes 10 minutes to take me to the final train station. 


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