St. Goar and Bacharach--Day4

Day 4 of our vacation was a very physically demanding day. We started with a hike up to Burg Rheinfels which overlooks the Rhine River and sits atop the town of St. Goar. I don't remember how many hundreds of feet we climbed, but it was pretty steep and quite a long hike...but man the views were amazing. The castle ruins were ok. We toured as a group with a castle tour guide, but the magic and awe of a castle ruin just don't do much for me.

After the tour we were free until after lunch so we hiked down through a vinyard, went into town and bought some necessities (toothpaste, advil, etc.) and ate a picnic lunch on a bench beside the river. We had ham and cheese sandwiches (they had boiled eggs on them, which I thought was weird until I ate it), strawberries and apple and rhubarb kuchen. The rhubarb kuchen was so sour that you couldn't eat it but the two bites that David took were so funny that I wanted him to keep trying to see if it got better.

After lunch we rode the train to a few towns over, Bacharach. There we took a tour with Herr Jung. He used to be the head schoolmaster for Bacharach and, while he's in his 70s, is still very agile both physically and mentally. We walked all over town from beside the river to the train tracks, through the city walls, on top of the city walls, inside the old town, down some really tight alleys and finally up, up, up into the vinyards (where I had an asthma attack becuase of all the hay lying around everywhere). Then we walked UP into the vinyards we it felt like we were on top of the world.

When the tour was over we had a little over an hour to do whatever we wanted to. David and I went down to the river to watch the boats go by. There were a flock of black birds eating bread from our bench neighbor. A few minutes into this interesting event, David said, "Look, that bird is carrying an egg." And just a I turned my head, the egg dropped on the ground and proved to be hard boiled. This caused such excitement among the birds that they were squawking and going crazy over eating that boiled egg. It was really funny.

We then met up with our group for our Rhine River cruise. It was really cold and windy outside, but there weren't any available seats inside, so we just had to tough it out. Once back in St. Goar we ate dinner with Marie and Carolyn and then headed back to our room for an early night and to ease our sore muscles.

I really enjoyed the Rhine River. I thought it was such a beautiful place and wish I'd had at least 2 or 3 more days to go explore more town. It would be so easy by train or bicycle to go from town to town and see castles and beautiful scenery everywhere. It will definitely be on my future travel itineraries.