Day 11: Boppard to Mainz

April 6, 2018

Yesterday's entry led off with the story of the Rhine flood that affected our hotel so seriously early in the year. We have now received two photos from the owner, that tell the tale. Wow!

The trauma seems quickly forgotten though, and today was our day to roll along the Rhine promenade, past a succession of fairy tale villages and castles. The part of the Rhine Valley that we cycled today was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1997. It is 65 km long and it's a real winner. Here is a shot from a billboard, that gives an idea of all the sights that are packed in here.

We began of course in Boppard, where we had spent the night. Our hotel, the Rebstock (which means grape vine) was very elegant, and except for the exploding bathtub we really appreciated it.

The rest of the town was of the same standard, with beautiful buildings and little traffic. We could have explored a lot more, but of course is the call of the road ahead.

Dodie really loves European wool shops. The one in Boppard had great sock wool in the window.

The focal point of the world heritage valley area is the Loreley, which is a hill across from St. Goar. The legend started with some poems in the early 1800's describing a lovely siren who sat on the hill and distracted sailors to crash on the rocks below. The legend and poems are so well known that you would expect to see "something" when you get there, but mainly it is just a hill.

From Boppard you can get on a smaller version of the long Rhine river boats and get taken down to Loreley and back for just 10 euros. That is a lovely cruise, but of course we were bicycling, not sailing. On the other hand the boats go at cycling speed, so we were accompanied by one for most of the way.

Often in cycling waterways we find that we are "racing" boats. But we find that (except for locks) they never get distracted or stop, while we do. So normally we lose. In this case the distraction was in the town of St. Goar. The town has a large cuckoo clock shop, unusual since it is far from the Black Forest. But we (I) love cuckoo clocks, so we stopped in for a chat. What to chat about? Well there is the always hot topic of whether to set a clock by rotating the minute hand clockwise or counter-clockwise. And then there was the question of why mine often starts to cuckoo and won't stop. And so on and so forth - for almost an hour!

From this telephoto shot, Burg Maus looks abandoned

World's largest free hanging cuckoo clock, they say. They do admit there is that one which is as big as a house (is a house!) in the Black Forest

My clock is actually in this group! There are 100's of styles and features in these clocks. One simple distinction is the Black Forest house (with the change in roof direction) vs the Swiss chalet. Both types are in this photo.

One other thing of note in the shop was a jigsaw puzzle of Europe, which could be helpful in keeping track of all these countries we seem to cycle in.

Beyond St Goar, of course, castles came thick and fast. I never get them straight, even with good cartoon maps that show their profiles. Anyway, I think this is Burg Katz:

Even railway tunnels look like castles here

Oberwesel was the next town up, and it too was beautiful:

As we travelled this prime section of Eurovelo 15 we encountered more and more touring cyclists. One even stuck his head into the above photo! Among the cyclists were quite a few family groups, often with fairly young children cycling on their own. Here is one of those, from behind, because I only thought of taking the photo too late:

One important role of the castles along the river was to collect tolls from river traffic. One spot that was ideal for this was Falkenau Island, near Kalb, that had a toll castle built on it. It looks stunning there, in the middle of the river.

It carried on like this, past Bacharach and other towns and castles, until Bingen. At Bingen we stopped for bratwurst and currywurst. Currywurst is sausage doused in standard yellow curry powder. Our first time in Germany we thought they had to be kidding. But now here we are ordering it on purpose. Bingen does mark the end of the extreme fairy tale run, but it is still true that all the way to Mainz there are buildings and landscapes that are blockbuster by the standards of other places. But now, though we still enjoyed cycling by the river and seeing beautiful buildings, it was not quite the same. We had ferried across to the other bank, and now were coping with a much less distinct path and a certain amount of traffic.

Nothing wrong with this, but not as zippy as the World Heritage valley.

Another factor in play was that we were getting exhausted. All day we had faced a strong head wind. The e-assist helps with this but it in no way erases it.

We were still 30 km from Mainz and we had optimistically booked a place about 4 km beyond that. Now it was time to buckle down and concentrate on getting there. But of course now was also the time to run into missing signage, missed signs, and construction blocking the way. I was getting really tired, and was amazed at how Dodie just kept on.

When you are exhausted, things like this in your path are very uncool:

Finally we did find and cross the bridge to Mainz. The public on this Friday afternoon clearly was not exhausted as we were, and were patronizing a fun fair along the river bank.

We left the fun behind and continued south along the river bank, dodging the many people who were out for a stroll. At any point here a right turn would have taken us into the older town, but we were on a mission to find the hotel we had booked, before total collapse.

Of course the GPS did eventually lead us to the place. Though is was somewhat out of town and neither new nor elegantly old, it is spacious and very restful. The place is called the Bristol Hotel. Our bikes are happily stashed, resting in the basement. And boy, the fluffy duvet and good bed looks so inviting for us now!

Today's ride: 86 km (53 miles)
Total: 545 km (338 miles)

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Marvin PaxmanWe are really enjoying today's entry because we remember so well this area from our trip in 2014. We stayed in Boppard, very close to the river. I remember you were actually on the Rhine at the same time only way way up river.
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