2019 Germany

After the depressing tour of Dachau, a wonderful evening and day long walk in Munich was a good antidote. Following a violent thunderstorm Monday evening, a group of us headed for the old town. We made one train stop before an announcement was made in German. Everyone got off the train. We discovered that due to the electrical storm train service was halted. So we deboarded and walked the rest of the he way. The town hall was a magnificent sight towering over the square. Historic town hall The next day we were able to catch the glockenspiel show. Dinner was at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant located down a back alley and up a couple flights of creaky stairs. Wonderful food. Excellent restaurant Our challenge the next morning was figuring out how to buy train tickets. Despite selecting "English" we had no idea what to do. Fortunately Julie found an English speaking native who explained that even Germans have trouble getting train tickets. But she persevered an...

As much as one prepares to see the depths of human depravity, there was no adequate preparation for the Dachau experience. We spent almost five hours walking the sacred grounds trod by 200,000 over the course of 12 years during the Nazi reign of terror. As one of the American soldiers who was among the first to enter the camp on April 29, 1945 said, there are no words to describe the horror. After entering the gates through which the victims came, we stood on the grounds where twice daily roll call occurred and brutal punishment was meted our at the whim of prison guards. Train platform where people were unloaded before their  short walk through the prison gate An intense movie graphically showed what happened sparing no detail. If our revulsion tank was not full after the movie, it was overflowing by the time we left the memorial. Many of the photos and movies were taken by news reporters who entered the camp with the US Army. Those photos took on new meaning as we stood i...

The shiny silver silo-like towers of the BMW headquarters welcomed us to Munich. BMW Headquqrters Our tour of the BMW Museum was ho-hum, with much of the museum devoted to how wonderful BMW is for developing electric car technolgy. One interesting tidbit was finding that the carbon fiber in BMW's comes from Moses Lake. We discovered too late that the best thing to see was the free BMW showroom across the street from the museum. Still neat old and new cars and classic motorcycles   Pick up your new BMW here.  But the best part of the day ended at a beer garden two blocks from the hotel. We once again quaffed Augustiner beer in a park-like setting. Here huge glass mugs of beer were married with gigantic pretzels and delicious wursts. Plate-size pretzel In contrast to the Salzburg beer garden, this one was a family venue featuring a well-equipped and much used playground.  Cool swing at the beer garden playground

It was a hard decision but we decided to forego seeing Eagle's Nest in order to spend the day experiencing Salzburg. So for most of the day, after a stroll through the Mirabell gardens, we walked the narrow streets and expansive plazas of the old city. One of the 17th century dwarf statues at Mirabell Gardens Timing is everything and our timing was good this day. It was the first day of some festival and the bands and marchers were out in force. With young boys cracking whips, old soldiers marching and shiny horses pulling colorful carriages, a parade encircled the plaza under the watchful eye of Mozart's statue. Following the Rick Steves Salzburg walking tour, we marveled at the old churches, statues, fountains and plazas. We're talking at least 750 year old stuff. When Columbus reached the Americas, this home was built There was a service at the cathedral (which was packed along with a huge overflow crowd in a tent) so we didn't get to see much there...

Take a bunch of underground salt mine tunnels, add a little Disney-like magic and you have a really fun tour. Donning heavy overalls we weren't sure what to expect. We lined up like the seven dwarfs ready to work the mine,  boarded our little train and decended into the earth. Happy miners ready to go What a blast! Twice we whooshed down well-worn wooden slides feeling the heat from the friction of the decent. A light show guided our boat across a subterranean lake. And despite all the fun, we learned about the process of mining salt that has occurred here for 500 years.  The scenery over the past few days has been storybook quality. Alpine meadows, ragged rocky mountains and snow capped peaks. Tidy farms with wooden barns. All in all visual wonderland. The day was capped with dinner at a monastery beer garden. Two burly Germans filled ceramic steins as fast as they could from giant wooden casks. Food vendors of all kinds lined a hallway which eventually led...

Our last night on the Lafayette featured another fine meal topped off with a baked Alaska set aflame by one of the chefs.  Server who kissed both Jan and Julie (and at least one other woman) on the head during the cruise.  Saying goodbye to those not continuing the journey, we gave our luggage to the crew to load on buses for the ride to Fussen. Mistake! On the way to Fussen we stopped in Ulm for lunch and did a quick tour of the church with the world's tallest steeple - 529 feet.  We checked into the hotel in Fussen, went to our room, then returned to the registration area to retrieve our luggage. As we walked through the door, our fellow travelers expressed their condolences. There in the middle of the lobby sat my red backpack drowning in a lake of wine. The desk clerk gave us two plastic bags so we could get the backpack to the room without leaving a soggy trail, while another hotel staff person started mopping the mess. Turns out one of the four bottl...

Heading north on the Rhine from Koblenz, it seems like there is a castle every few miles, located high on the hill carefully watching us slide up the river. We learned most housed the "robber-barons" who exacted a toll from boats using the river. It was a very expensive trip for 12th and 13th century  merchants. Some protested the extortion by atracking the castles and the French really took castle destruction to heart in the late 1700's. Most of the castles were destroyed and rebuilt in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Moselle (right) meets the Rhine at Kolblenz An exception was the Burg Eltz castle that was actually a family home and is owned today by a 33rd generation family member. We enjoyed  an informative tour of the castle passing miles of farmland and forest to get there. Many of the furnishings were period pieces from the family and the castle contained several original works of art. Burg Eltz Castle On our final day of sailing, we ...

Four locks and 90 kilometers after leaving Cochem we arrived in Bernkastel. Sailing almost all day down a quiet river might seem boring, but it was incredibly enthralling. All day long we were captivated by vineyard after vineyard marching up steep rocky hillsides surrounding what are called "wine villages", each with a church sporting a steeple topped with a cross under a rooster weathervane.  Workers cling like mountain goats to the land, working among the vines. We saw on two different occasions a worker glide to the top of the vineyard riding a stand-on rototiller cleaning  between the rows. One of the workers tilled both up and down; the other walked it down and only tilled up the hill. We passed the extremely steep vineyard we heard about during our wine tasting the previous day. Unfortunately my picture doesn't come close to showing how really steep it was.  Bike paths flank each side of the Moselle and they are full of traffic. As we saw on the Rhine, RV abod...