Rhine and Danube River Cruise, Part 1

The Rhine and Main Rivers

Our good friends Alice and Jerry told us last fall that they were planning to take a river cruise on the Rhine and Danube and asked if we might we be interested.  I said instantly, “Yes.  We’re in.”   

The Viking Modi (a minor Norse god) was our home for two weeks.  We had a French balcony which we found out is four inches wide.  It is a patio door with a railing.  It actually was nice.  We often stood there leaning on the railing watching the river and shore go by.

Amsterdam

After an overnight flight from Chicago, we hit the ground running in Amsterdam at 8:00 AM.  We soon slowed to a limping walk though.  The wait at Anne Frank’s house was 3 ½ hours. (I had tried and failed to reserve advance online tickets.)  So we bought a hop off/hop on ticket for the canal tours and enjoyed the unique architecture of this city ten to twelve feet below sea level. There are no skyscrapers in Amsterdam because the weight would be too much for the pilings driven 45 feet deep that must support buildings when you build below sea level.  

Houses along the canals are 18 feet wide, up to 45 feet deep and 3 or 4 stories high. The gable ends are ornate—very striking.  The cargo hook on top is for hoisting heavy loads or furniture to upper floors.

People live in about 2500 houseboats moored along the canals.

We did walk a couple streets in the Red Light District.  The girls standing in full length windows wearing bikinis were beautiful, but we were warned not to take pictures.  So you will have to get the idea from these paintings on the street wall.

Streets are narrow so more people get around on bikes than cars, 550,000 bikes in Amsterdam, 50,000 of which get stolen each year.  This is a four story bicycle parking garage.

Windmills of Kinderdyjk

Half of the Netherlands is below sea level on land reclaimed from the sea by building dykes and pumping water out. Hollanders perfected the windmills centuries ago to lift water from canals over a dyke to a higher reservoir where it could removed by opening sluice gates into a river flowing away.  The resulting polders became farms and villages. The Kinderdyjk polder is 40 miles by 25 miles, all drained naturally by canals to the lowest area and then pumped by rows of windmills.  The 19 that are left here were built in 1738 and 1740, and are a UNESCO World heritage site.  Present day volunteer millers are trained for years before being allowed to live in one and manage it.

The windmill vanes are wooden grids covered by just enough sail to allow them to catch enough wind to turn at a manageable speed. 

The last family that lived in this mill in the early 1900’s raised 12 children in 3 rooms plus the work space in the mill’s 4 floors.

By wooden gears the rotation transfers down to turn a water wheel under the mill lifting water from a ditch from the canal to another ditch running to the reservoir. These old wheels can pump 50,000 liters of water per minute.

The tan fields in the diagram are the potential reservoir.

When the reservoir got high enough, sluice gates opened to allow the water to run into the river.  The modern version uses these augers to lift the reservoir's water to the river, so the reservoirs do not fill up as often anymore.

The Rhine River

Cologne

Our walking tour guide in Cologne was a delightful woman with feminist leaning jokes.  She pointed out brauhauses, Roman remnants, and the ornate city hall. 

Old city hall

 Dionysus Mosaic at Roman Germanic Museum

The jewel of Cologne is the sprawling Gothic cathedral, one of the largest in the world. The light stone is blackened by pollution over the years, particularly from the trains at the nearby station. The size and grandiosity are almost overwhelming.

The Middle Rhine

We toured the massive Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, taking large cable cars across the Rhine from the boat to the other side in Koblenz. The military stone fortress was built to protect the strategic confluence of the Rhine and Moselle Rivers from the French. It succeeded.

Don, Jean, Alice, and Jerry.  Note the Moselle water bluer than the Rhine.

The Marksburg Castle is a 13^th century gem that is rare in that it was never destroyed.

All afternoon we sat on the rooftop deck watching the most beautiful stretch of the Rhine drift by, castle after vineyard after lovely village.  We had wine, spiked Rudesheimer coffee and German desserts.  

The vineyards grow in vertical rows for ease in care and picking the grapes, everything done by hand.

Castles of the Hostile Brothers who feuded and built separate castles with a wall between. When they reconciled, they would wake each other with an arrow shot. Tragically one brother opened his window just as the other sent his arrow there.

Maus Castle

Katz Castle

We frequently saw campgrounds along the river.

Lorelei was a siren who sat on a high rock above the river and lured sailors to crash.  It helped that this was a narrow part of the river with many submerged reefs. 

Poet Heinrich Heine helped popularize the legend.  Here is a part.

The loveliest maiden is sitting

High-throned in yon blue air,

Her golden jewels are shining, 

She combs her golden hair;

She combs with a comb that is golden 

And sings a strange refrain

That steeps in a deadly enchantment

The listener's ravished brain.

The doomed in his drifting shallop,

is tranced with a sad sweet tone,

He sees not the yawning breakers, 

He sees but the maid alone.

The pitiless billows engulf him,

So perish sailor and bark.

Rheinstein Castle

We made a quick stop for the staff to take trash off the boat in a kind of bag brigade.

The Main River

We left the Rhine at Frankfort to sail the Main since it flows from the mountains closer to the Danube.

Miltenberg

Miltenberg is a lovely little town.  We walked around the old town and climbed up to the castle atop a hill (seen above the church here) on the edge of the deep German forest.  We often saw swans on the river.

The half-timbered houses and old churches made the walk a joy.  

We had a beer in Zum Riesen, the oldest gasthaus (1590) in Germany where Martin Luther had a beer and Elvis Presley stayed overnight.   

Franconia

Franconia and France were all the same people 2000 years ago. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, ruled these lands and became the first Holy Roman Emperor in the 800’s.  Later came the age of smaller principalities and bishoprics like Wurzburg, Bamberg and Nuremberg.  The rise of nations saw France taking part of Rhineland and in return ceding northeastern Franconia to Bavaria. The Franconians have never been happy with this and do not want to be called Bavarians even though politically, they are.

The Romantic Road was not the forests and streams I expected.  It is farmland and charming villages where the people live rather than on the farms themselves.  Cattle stay indoors while the fertile land produces crops to feed the animals as well as sugar beets, wheat, and other crops.  Franconian white wine is a wonderful wine in distinct bocksbeutels, a word which could mean brook bag or corrupted by time to goat scrotum. Oh, well, the flat bulbous glass bottles hold a lovely wine.

Rothenburg

Rothenburg is one of the best preserved walled medieval town existing.  

We walked the city wall which still surrounds the entire old town.  Lovely to look down into people’s gardens.

Wurzburg

The cathedral in Wurzburg is enormous with several wings and a chapel devoted to St. Killian who brought Christianity to Franconia.  

Archbishop Johann Von Schoenborn also became prince of Wurzburg and decided he needed a Residenz to reflect his position.  He hired the renowned architect Balthasar Neumann to design a sumptuous Baroque palace with gold leaf everywhere and the largest ceiling fresco in the world.

Marienburg Fortress above Wurzburg

Franconia countryside

Zeil is a Franconian village that was known for its witch hunts in the 1700’s. People were accused for a variety of reasons. The Prince Bishop of Bamberg, a superstitious man, encouraged this mindset and used witch accusations to get rid of political enemies.  Those accused were tortured until they confessed and then burned. 

Zeil’s half-timbered houses showed the owners wealth by the complexity of the timber designs used in the construction.

Maria Limbach Walfurtkirche (lim for the linden tree, bach for brook, walfurt for pilgrimage). This modest sized, but highly ornate, church set among fields and hills was a popular pilgrimage destination. 

The Three Crowns (for the wise men) serves its own beer, one of them smoked beer.  The green brewer’s malt is dried over a beech wood fire giving a lovely smoked flavor to the beer.  You either love it or hate it.  I loved it; Don hated it.

The region of eastern Franconia and northern Bavaria has the densest collection of breweries in the world:  250 in a 60 mile radius of Nuremberg. Each brewpub serves only their own; many don't bottle it.

In Bamburg we toured their prince bishop’s summer palace/hunting lodge.  Not quite up to Wurzburg’s, but impressive all the same.

Nuremberg

Nuremberg brought a sobering look at WW II history.  We visited the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, a grandiose amphitheater that was intended for Hitler to address the masses.  It was never finished, but other structures were used by the Nazis as they considered Nuremberg an important area.  The amphitheater stands but is not maintained—deliberately so as not to honor it.  Built into one corner is an impressive museum that explains the Nazi machine and Hitler’s rise to power.  Intense.

We then visited Courtroom 600 where the Nuremberg trials were held to convict most of the top level Nazis. A few committed suicide besides Hitler. Three were acquitted due to evidence that they were not as culpable, and proving to the world that the trials were conducted fairly, not just in vengeance as were Stalin’s war trials which lasted a couple hours.  The Nuremberg process led to the permanent establishment of International law and the world court at The Hague.

We wandered the old town a bit and shared a Nuremberg bratwurst lunch with others form the ship.  Their sausages are very good, small like a breakfast link.  Wonderful sauerkraut and German potato salad too.

We four are retired teachers, and we were surprised to meet so many other teachers on the trip.  Dinner conversations with them was always interesting.  Many of them also did the optional Nazi tour—I guess teachers never stop wanting to learn.

Main-Danube Canal

The cruise in its entirety uses 64 locks to go upriver on the Rhine and Main rivers, transverse the Main-Danube Canal, and descend the Danube to Budapest.  Most are typical river locks, but in the Main-Danube Canal they become very high. The canal, 106 miles long, is a marvel of engineering in that it goes across a continental divide.  Its 16 locks raise the canal to an elevation of 1332 feet above sea level.  The three highest locks are about 80 feet high.  The water for the highest lock is pumped up from the Danube and Main Rivers and stored in reservoirs and reused over and over.  Some water, of course, runs down with the ships, but 60% goes back into the reservoir to be reused. Amazing! 

One day we returned to the ship to find the staff waiting for us--so sweet.  With only 189 guests and 3 floors, we felt like a big family by the end of the trip.