Rudesheim

 Our Journey is nearing the end and today we wake to the sounds of ducks, geese and trains. We have docked in Rudesheim, a small town on the Rhine. It is home to Sigfried's musicial cabinet, a small museum dedicated to a collection of mechanical musical instruments. There are over 350 exhibits in the museum which is a house built for a nobleman in 1542. Many of the pieces were painstakingly rebuilt by Sigfried before his death in 2016. The engineering and craftsmanship in these pieces of equipment are astounding.




Rudesheim is also home to Rudesheimer coffee. This is coffee with Brandy on 3 cubes of sugar. The alcohol is burned off while the brandy is stirred to dissolve the sugar. The brewed coffee is then poured in and topped off with whipped cream.  It is a little expensive compared to a normal coffee but one has to try the experience. As we were finishing our coffee a group of Chinese tourists came  to the coffee shop. They only wanted to use the toilets and created a major disruption to the patrons. They even pushed Ann out of the road so they could take photos of the wood heater. We left there and found a souvenir shop to get some gifts for those back home. As we went to pay the Chinese tourists once again started pushing in and barging in front of everyone. The poor woman at the shop was having a hard time  with one of them and I was getting pretty annoyed at them passing stuff backwards and forwards instead of browsing first. The next time they tried passing items around I stopped them and told them to ........... We seemed to get to the front pretty quickly after that and the lady behind the counter seemed a little relieved.

We slowly worked our way back to the boat in preparation for our trip down the Rhine to Cologne. This is the prettiest part of the Rhine with Castles on hilltops and picture postcard villages. Some of the castles have been rebuilt but only as they think they may have been in the past, whilst some ruins remain as ruins. The weather started to sour as we approached the Loralei Rock. We pretty much went inside from there as it was too wet and cold out now.

 




After dinner we had another quiz night and still missed out on a prize, but then we weren't using google for the answers. As we were finishing up the quiz we arrived at Cologne. This is a big city and the lights at night were something special. Time to retire in preparation for the Cologne tours tomorrow..



Day 15 Cologne

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