Bacharach and Beyond

Sunday we headed down to an area called the Romantic Rhine. This area is known for its half timbered old houses and Riesling wine. We saw plenty of both.

We set out for Sankt Goar with our cruiser bikes in the car. The plan was to park the car in St. Goar, bike along the river to Bacharach for lunch and continue on to Bingen. At Bingen we would take the Koln Dusseldorfer boat down river to St. Goar. I figured it would be a faster boat ride going with the strong current of the Rhine.

We had a coffee in St. Goar so we had to stop for a bathroom break in Oberwesel. Oberwesel was a sleepy town in contrast to the tourist laden St. Goar. It isn't somewhere I would stop again. There is a 3km medieval town wall which runs along the river. You can actually climb up and walk on top of it. As we walked on top of the wall Jim said, "it's just like the Great Wall of China, except it's not in China and it's not all that great."

Our next stop was Bacharach which hasn't changed at all since I was there in 1994. It was still a beautiful old German town. We stopped for lunch at Zum Grunen Baum for what they called a light lunch - a sausage with hot potato salad and a cheese plate.

We decided to split one wine sampling to go with our "light" lunch. Apparently, I didn't read the menu all that closely. We were expecting a 4 wine sampling of the local white wines and received a huge lazy susan filled with 15 different glasses of wine. The Germans around us found our predicament very entertaining.

Needless to say, we decided to forgo the bike ride down to Bingen and preferred to spend the rest of the afternoon walking around Bacharach. After successfully finishing our carousel of wine, we hiked up to the Burg Stahleck. This 12th-century castle was turned into a hostel. I stayed there for a night back in 1993 when I travelled around Europe.

We took the KD boat to St. Goar with our bikes. All of the seats on the top of the boat were taken by Japanese tourists so we parked ourselves in the front of the boat. We ate almond Magnum bars (the best ice cream bars in the world) while enjoying the views on the way back.

Back in Bonn, we headed downtown to the wine festival set up in Munsterplatz. We weren't able to get there on Saturday night so thought we'd check to see if it was still going on Sunday night. We were in luck. There were a ton of people having a very good time as you can see from the video.