Keen's European Vacation - Day 4

Luxembourg - Trier - Koblenz (GERMANY)

The trip to Trier took only 45 mins and we crossed the border into Germany where they speak German! and the town of Trier, where we visited the home of Karl Marx the father of Marxism, and the black gate (Noir Gate), built by the Romans to protect the city of Trier from attack. It is all that remains of the walled fortress. 0.50 euro for the rest rooms, they play nice music because the line is so long!

Leaving Trier to drive to Koblenz is massed vineyards on very steep hillsides. They are grown his way due to the lack of sunshine and cold weather and snow. This is a white wine growing region as the names of he rivers are a dead give away the Mosel and the Rhine. My kind of countryside! We will experience the autobahn for the first time today. Very green treed areas and picturesque villages nestled in the valleys. Only tourist buses are out and about here today. In Europe Sunday is a day of rest and all shops are closed, people sleep very late and spend the day at home; so very little traffic or movement about, now back on the bus for the 2-hour trip to Koblenz. Pete has a few fans on the bus, a man from Indonesia and a young guy who looks Arabic maybe? They keep chatting to him about the harp and taking his picture at every given opportunity. Of course, he is lapping up the attention and playing up to them!

Koblenz is known as the corner of Germany, it's not really on the corner but is so named due to the fact that is this point where 2 great rivers meet after their separate journeys and become one. The Mosel and the Rhine combine and the mighty river continue to the sea as the Rhine. 
We drove

through rather industrial areas to arrive at the riverfront. The area was starting to come alive at around 11:30am. We filed off the bus once again and followed our tour guide Lex (from the Netherlands) for a quick orientation and briefing for meeting times. Our group has been awesome getting back to our meeting points on time. This is because the very laconic Lex quietly advised that the bus would leave 5mins after the scheduled time regardless, unless we contacted him to advise we were lost or held up at a local restaurant etc.

We opted for the traditional german lunch with your choice of sausage or pork knuckle, beer or white wine. We arrived and sat with other people from the tour in a very cute German restaurant, we had soup then out came the main meal, OMG sausage to make you eyes water! 3 ginormous skins of goodness, 1 Weiner, 1 bratwurst and 1 frankfurter! Then the pork knuckle; it must have been donated by the prize winning German swine, it was huge, cooked to perfection and so succulent it was falling off the bone! Both meals were served on a bed of creamy mash potato and sauerkraut with gravy! A true taste sensation and we are really stoked that we opted in to this experience 15 out of 39 of the group went along. The bonus during lunch was a lone saxophone player who was awesome played alongside the restaurant, he was very talented and easy on the eye girls, if you get my drift! I thought of Kent teaching himself and practising up a storm in Gloucester, it will get easier matey! We took a stroll along the waterfront where the local music talent was putting on various shows for the festival. Some excellent guitarists, and a big band.

made me wonder how they maintain and harvest the fruit?
We arrived for our Rhine river cruise and boarded a beautiful vessel called the Loreley Elegance.  Along the cruise we learned of the Legend of Loreley.  She was a beautiful lady who used to have a favourite spot to brush her hair and sing a haunting and very beautiful song high on the hill top along the river Rhine. Legend has it that the ships captains and crew became mesmerised by her beauty and her song and the vessels would crash onto the rocks. There are flags depicting the spot and a statue on the banks of a turn in the river.

Our boat was a floating restaurant and bar, but we had eaten our massive meat lunch and could not even enjoy a beer on our river journey, not a bad thing really! The floating tour continued and we spied in the distance high upon a hill our first castle! It took our breath away, it was a fairy tale vision only previously conjured up in our imaginations! 62 and 55 years old seeing a real fairy tale castle, perched high on a hill with an ancient church and village nestled below snuggled like a sleeping baby against the banks of a legendary Rhine. It was the first of so many. I asked the tour guide, were there so many kings in Germany to have so many castles? Then I thought to myself, idiot, Germany has a prime minister, but in my own defence maybe they did have many kings in 1318. But no, the castles were built by private families and nowadays are owned and operated mostly as hotels and restaurants a few are privately owned. I did see a few that are falling into ruin, but mostly they are preserved and used which is wonderful, as fairy tale castles can't be allowed to crumble and turn to ruins.

Villages with their churches and pubs and one curiosity that any self respecting Aussie will relate to, Beer Church! Yes, you heard correctly! The pub has a church attached to it and you can only access the church by passing through the pub! The preacher/priest/reverend / pastor serves the beer and then delivers the church service. They would pack out the Sunday sermon if we had though of this earlier! The cruise lasted about and hour and ten minutes and we soaked up the sun on the open deck and then when we were due to disembark we went below to the air conditioned comfort to cool off, our coach met us with those passengers that did not take up the cruise option and we were off once again.

Our driver Huumbert (The Netherlands), took us up the mountain through the narrowest of streets he navigated our massive coach around bends between houses that side walls stood on the edge of road. Many scrapes were along the ancient walls where lesser drive captains had failed or chickened out. We alighted from the bus at the top and walked along the path up and up to the statue of Germain. OMG!, they sure know how to go BIG in this country! It is so tall and so massive you cannot even look at it all, as you have to crane your neck so far you nearly fall over! I bought the little booklet for 2.50€ and it will go in my little treasure box of tour memories when I get home. We then travelled for an hour and arrived in Frankfurt at 6pm. By this time we were knackered and the city was bustling and we had been warned numerous times about pick pockets, so we found a pub, sat down and bought a beer. €4 each. I left Pete and went in search of diet coke and take away food with Lyn, Jackie and Jess. Successful in the soft drink, bombed out on the take away food. No supermarkets in sight in Frankfurt, this city was rebuilt after the war as the modern city so it has many high rise buildings not really seen across much of Europe. It is called a working town and is known as the Manhattan of Europe and Bankfurt as many banks and the most important bank in Europe are located here, being the Eurobank.

We drove half an hour to our hotel located near Frankfurt airport, NH Frankfurt Airport West. It was clean, and modern. No tea or coffee making facilities in the room, and no fridge in ours although others had them apparently. The China Dolls from Hong Kong ordered dinner when we arrived at the hotel and got it 2 hours later. We opted for muesli bars and bickies and dip, bourbon and scotch. We had a pool and Pete went out there a few times to chat to others, I woke up in the morning to get in the shower and he had left the door to our room open. No pickpockets in this hotel, they would have had a field day with our electronics! The breakfast was amazing, hot & cold, English, European and everything in between. The muesli was impressive, strawberry, chocolate and some just for me, multi grain sugar free, fresh yoghurt, toppers including chia seeds, pipitas, yoghurt etc. We were fed an on the bus by 8am this morning and some passengers left and more joined us, we picked them up at the Hauptbahnhof (central station).