Rhine River & Mosel Valley, Day 3

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Hello again!! We have had some busy, busy days, but our hotel room tonight has wireless internet - yahoo!!!

Day 3 we spent in the Rhine River and Mosel Valley region of Germany. This area was, of course, a major trade route. All along the Rhine and Mosel Rivers are castles. It seems like every hilltop has a castle!! And today we explored two of them...

The first was in our home-base town, Bacharach. Burg (castle) Rheinfels was the biggest castle on the Rhine River. It was blown up by the French, so all that’s left is ruins. It feels pretty big, but back in the day it was massive - 5 times bigger and taller than it is now. We had some pretty great views of the river from up on our hilltop - one of the major tourist attractions is a boat cruise down the Rhine. We didn’t have time for that however, because we visited…

Burg Eltz, one of the best (so we heard) castles in all of Europe. We agreed - it was really awesome. We traveled to the middle of nowhere on the Mosel Valley side (imagine this region as an upside down V - the Mosel Valley is on the left side, and the Rhine River is on the right side - they meet up at the point on top). Burg Eltz was built in the 1400’s and was never destroyed or taken over. It has been in the Eltz family for 30 generations, and they still live there!! They live in one part of the castle and allow tours in the other. Since it was never destroyed, everything is still intact including the furnishings. It was a great opportunity to see how they lived back then, castle-style… They didn’t allow any pictures inside unfortunately, but as you can see, the exterior alone is pretty awesome. It sits in the middle of the valley (the castle controlled passers-by through the valley). It was a quest getting out there, but it was definitely worth it.

That pretty much took up our day, so we ended it with dinner back in Bacharach and Riesling (the regional wine) flavored ice cream for dessert - yummmm!!!

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Comments

[Christie]

WOW!!!
This is BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!