The quaint ol' West Germany

Trip Start May 10, 2009

Trip End Jul 02, 2009

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Where I stayed

Altes Winzerhaus Cochem

(Cochem hotels)

Flag of Germany Sankt Goar, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Sunday, June 14, 2009

Today’s the first real day of travelling on the bus for me, basically straight through from Amsterdam to the Rhine Valley whilst making a stop at an AutoBahn rest stop for lunch. There was a lot of info to get through as Jackie explained all the optional extras on the tour, as she needed to know numbers for them all by today… it’s a bit hard to say what will be good and what will be bad (except for the white water rafting which will be awesome!), not that it matters really cos most of the optional extras really aren’t “optional”. For example, tomorrow there is a cruise across the lake at Lucerne, and if we choose not to do it, we just ride around the lake instead with just the bus driver – so peer pressure and the fact that you’ll be doing the less interesting things mean pretty much everyone will be doing the extras.

The only one I opted out of was the Venetian restaurant, as there are plenty of other options in Venice (unlike Monaco) – and I’m sure I can find food for less than 29e

Castle in the Rhine Valley

!

From the rest stop through to the Rhine Valley we had open-mic introductions at the front of the bus, and it’s surprising the number of people who are here who are in nerdy professions like myself (accountants, insurance analysts, physio’s, etc).

The Rhine valley is quite beautiful; although it’s difficult having been to Norway to say it was amazing, certainly if you see this first you’ll go “wow”. We saw a good bit of it on the warm and sunny deck of a cruise boat which tripped us down the Rhine to St Goar.

St Goar was really quite nice – better than expected; the world’s largest free-standing cuckoo clock is here, and there were a couple souvenir shops open, including an original beer stein place where they explained how German steins are made. They had a huge range there (including steins depicting engineers!!), and they also do special limited edition steins (such as the one made especially for Contiki which covers the destinations on our trip). But the prices they were asking were really, really high – I guess the other ones which I’ve seen around are the cheap “made in China” brand ones, as we were talking 40euro for a medium sized stein

Our Rhine cruise boat

!

Ahh, found a Christmas shop selling those smoking men from Saxony… I’ve been kicking myself for not buying one back in Dresden – so while I can’t say I bought it in Dresden while I was there, at least I have one now.

After tea up at the hotel (the Winzerhous) it was a short walk over to a nearby cellar where we undertook some wine tasting, the wines really weren’t that great – except for the eiswine which was very “wow” (but not a 28euro wow…)

We didn’t get an opportunity to go to the Lorley lookout point as a thunderstorm had rolled in by that stage and it was raining… for those that are wondering – it’s the point where a young lass supposedly jumped to her death cos of her unrequited love, thus becoming a mermaid haunting the Rhine river for the next thousand years or so. Anyway, it was a perfect opportunity for an early one I decided that maybe I’ll go to bed super early and see if I can get up early to go for a walk to the lookout myself first thing in the morning.