Wednesday December 20: Cochem
A Night Stroll
I wonder if I’m ever going to sleep the whole night through while on this trip. Again I had a sleep disturbance during the night. To make matters worse, I felt the start of a scratchy throat.
I woke up this morning, feeling sort of like a zombie, and with an increasingly scratchy throat.
We went on the walking tour of the Reichsburg castle and town of Cochem. This was again definitely the right thing to do. Things were a bit confused. Most of the people with the big busses were going to some underground wine markets an hour away. We got a minibus. However, there were three more people than seats for the bus. One of the guides took the last three people to the castle in her personal car.
The castle was a very nice one. It had been destroyed several hundred years ago. A wealthy businessman bought it and restored it just before WWII. It ended up going to the German government and eventually to the town. During this process, the furniture was removed. They have since gotten enough furniture to outfit 7 rooms. These are the rooms on the tour.
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I don’t know if the castle was normally closed, and they opened it for us, or whether it was normally open but we were the only ones there. In any event, we seemed to be the only tour there. Our guide kept opening doors in front of us and closing them behind us.
After the castle tour, we took the minibus down the hill to the town. Three of us volunteered to stand in the aisle for the short ride. (Actually about 5 people volunteered, but only 3 were needed.)
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The town tour was fairly small. Most of the shops were closed. It looks like they had a Christmas market, but it was now closed/gone.
After the tour, Amy and I visited a mustard factory shop. We tasted several of them, and bought a few. They told us not to put this mustard in the fridge, and to not use metal utensils with it.
We then visited the town church. After that we missed the minibus back, so we walked. It was about a 10 minute walk, just over the bridge and down a short ways.
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When we got back, there was another boat moored on the water side of our boat. I went back to bed and tried to catch a little sleep, but all I did was rest. I never managed to actually sleep. There were a few bumps when apparently the other ship left, and another Viking ship docked against ours.
Lunch was delayed. It was at 2, but the big busses were not yet back. So a small handful of us enjoyed a mellow lunch, with about as many serving staff as diners. About 3/4 of the way through our meal, the three busses pulled up and disgorged their contents. Shortly thereafter, the horde descended on the dining room, and things got much noisier and busier. Almost immediately, we noticed the boat had started moving. We were apparently just waiting for the guests to return.
They came on the PA system and said that due to low bridges they were closing the top deck and lowering the pilot house. Right now, as I type this, a bunch of us are sitting inside at the bow of the boat looking for the low bridge, as we want to get pictures of it going under. So far, we haven’t seen it, and google maps doesn’t seem to show any prospects in the near future.
There are no afternoon activities today, so it has been a fairly quiet afternoon. The tour manager was supposed to give a spiel about other trips that Viking goes on, but I think this must have been rescheduled due to the lateness of the bulk of the guests’ return.
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I found out that the low bridge will actually be early tomorrow morning. We should be setting sail at 4:30am, and the bridge might be crossed around 5:30 or so. I’m not planning to get up to see it (particularly as it will be fairly dark). He said that it should clear the boat by centimeters, but I think that was an exaggeration (not to mention dangerous). Later, I think he said that if he stood on the top deck, his head would brush the bottom of the bridge.
We just had a mellow afternoon. We saw Andrew’s spiel about the Viking cruise line, its history, and all the wonderful other cruises we could go on in the future. A while after he had finished, I was about to go down to the cabin and take a quick lie-down before dinner, but then we ran into Andrew heading up to the lounge to give his evening briefing. So we went back up and heard the plans for tomorrow.
That pretty much ran until dinner. We shared the table with a couple from Australia.
After dinner, we decided to take a quick walk into town and see the Christmas lights. It was maybe a 10 minute walk. We went there, turned the corner, and said, “Wow!” The center of town was nicely lit, but with all white bulbs. Coincidentally, we ran into our dinner mates who had already walked to the square. We walked around for a while, then we swung by the church which was very dark. We returned to the boat, I’m writing this up, and now I’ll hit the sack.
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