On a Boat
Today we got out the door around 8:30 to head south for a boat tour down the Rhine. It was raining and chilly this morning but when we got off our train (about 2 hours) it was sunny and much warmer. The train ride into the middle Rhine valley was just beautiful. The surrounding hills/mountains were peppered with small castles about every 2-3 miles and the slopes were covered with vineyards. Before our boat left at 2:30 we grabbed some lunch and a glass of local wine. I had a medium dry white wine and it was excellent. Picture us sitting in an outdoor garden-like cafe overlooking the river with the far banks covered in green vineyards. The cafe was quiet with mostly locals sitting quietly in pairs sipping wine and speaking german. It’s difficult to take everything in… especially when we’ve seen so many increaible things these past two weeks. I feel bad because I know that at this point I am slightly numb - in other words it takes much more to make me say “wow” than when we first arrived. Imagine riding a rolleroaster 10 times a day for two weeks straight. At some point you’d stop screaming on the first hill drop. It’s amazing how quickly the human brain adjusts to new things and resets what it considers “normal”. I suppose this means that when I return home I’ll be struck with how plain and history-less our towns are for a couple days.
The boat ride was nice and chill. It lasted about 3 hours and we saw about a dozen awesome castles.
Today we got robbed. By the public transportation system. We each paid about 50 euro for train tickets. That’s about 70 dollars. Here’s the kicker - we never had our tickets checked once. It’s tempting to ride without a ticket and if we do get checked just play like a dumb tourist. This trip is turning out to be about 180% as expensive as I anticipated. Ahh!! To make myself feel better I had three mcdonalds cheesburgers for dinner with no drink haha. Don’t worry, we’ve had plenty of great local cuisine, but nothing beats fast food when it comes to eating cheap.
We’re back at the hostel relaxing in the common room. This hostel is small and really chill. Must be 6 people here tops. It’s great, especially after experiencing the meyhem in London. We’ve decided that, so far, this hostel wins in every category except breakfast. Breakfast was only toast, but it’s more than we’ve had at other places.
Gonna be another early morning tomorrow for our 6:30 flight to Munich. That means up and at em at 4:15!
Time to relax a bit and get some rest.
