Tuesday: October 1
Braughbach, Castles
We weren’t leaving until 9:15 this morning, so we had a fairly leisurely morning. Just after we got up, Amy happened to glance out the window, and she saw that we were just passing a castle relatively close to the water. So we both grabbed cameras, ran out to the balcony, and got a bunch of pictures. This was lucky timing. If Amy had looked out one minute later or one minute earlier, she wouldn’t have seen it.
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After breakfast, we got ready for the morning castle trip. I wore my hiking boots as they had warned that there were some rough stone steps. My boots ended up being unnecessary because the steps were only treacherous to someone who could barely walk.
The Marksburg castle was on top of a hill, and I was worried that it would be cold and windy up there, so I wore my orange fleece shirt and red fleece jacket. Initially, this was way too much. There was a short walk up the hill from the bus to get to the castle. I took off my jacket and was fine. Later on, however, I put the jacket on for the tour, and I was fine to slightly warm.
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We were broken into four groups, staggered by 10 minutes to avoid too large of crowd. We were in the 4th, so we had about a half hour to wander around and take pictures. Amy got some pretty good pictures; I haven’t looked at mine yet.
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Afterwards, we walked back down to the buses, and then got bussed about a half hour upstream. Our boat was docked on the other side of the river, so we had to take a ferry across and then walk back to the boat. It was docked just below a castle, so of course we had to take lots of pictures as we got on board. It was already lunch time, so after getting a few more pictures of the castle, I dropped my stuff off in the room and joined Amy for lunch.
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The timing was a bit unfortunate, because we started upstream just about as I was getting to lunch. The next stretch was the “romantic river” stretch, full of castles. It was unfortunate because either we could have lunch or go up top and look at castles, but it was hard to do both. After a pleasant lunch, I got my red fleece jacket and went up, but I found that it was too warm, so I went back and exchanged it for my raincoat. It was mostly cloudy, but dry, with rare bursts of sunlight. I’ve been sitting up on the top deck and writing up the day, with occasional flurries of picture taking as we pass by a castle. Later on, it got cooler, so I switched back to my fleece jacket.
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One strange thing is that we passed by some long thin islands. These were only about 3 feet wide, but hundreds of feet long. They were covered by a line of trees. The strange part is that every now and again, there would be a shallow break in the line/island. In some of these, the water would be pouring through the island to the other side. Apparently there was a partial obstruction from the island to the bank at the upper end, so that the water on the far side was slightly lower than on the main channel side. They were so long, thin, and straight, I have to think that they were man made.
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Amy just came up and said that she was a first. What she meant was that she managed to go out on the porch, slam the door closed, and get it to lock, so she was locked on the balcony. She heard someone nearby, called to them, and had a crew member come in and unlock the door. He said that this was the first time someone had locked themselves outside on the balcony.
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We watched the crew putting away the lounge chairs on the sun deck and then lower the awnings. One guy took a time-lapse of them working, which was really neat to watch. Unfortunately the sun deck will be shut down while we are sailing for a number of days, until we reach the Danube. This is because we have to go under a bazillion low bridges, some of which we might only clear by inches.
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Then we came down, I changed clothes, and then we went up to a cocktail party for the “Explorer’s Club”, those people who had been on a previous Viking cruise. It was a very exclusive club, containing only about half or three-quarters of the whole ship. They featured Aquavit, which I would argue is a very strong paint thinner. I can’t stomach the stuff.
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That led to the port talk and then to dinner. Just before 9 we went up to the lounge for a trivia game. I saw that we were in another of the 67 locks that we need to travel through. I couldn’t go up to the sun deck, so I went to the bow, where there was a small group watching the lock operation. I decided to take a time-lapse of the lock doors opening, and the ship sailing out. I didn’t think things through. Because of the Plexiglas “walls”, I had to hold my phone a bit higher that eye level. It ended up taking rather a while for lock doors to open and the boat to leave, and by the time I stopped the video, my shoulder and arms were killing me. It would have been a lot easier on the sun deck where I could have rested the phone on the railing at a more reasonable height.
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Then I came in and we joined in a trivia game/contest. This wasn’t really trivia as much as “trick questions”, e.g. “A guy builds a house with 4 walls, all of which face south. He see’s a bear. What color is it?” (White, his house is at the North Pole.) Or “Can a man legally marry his widow’s sister?” (No, because he is dead.) I actually had more fun than I expected. After the 14 questions, we traded papers and graded them. I knew we had at least one wrong because we couldn’t come up with an answer for one of them. “A butcher is 5 foot 10 inches tall. What does he weigh?” We couldn’t figure this one out, but the answer ended up being “meat”. It turns out that we got one other one wrong (which from the sound of the crowd when he gave the answer, almost everyone also got wrong), so we ended up with a score of 12. I thought we might be a contender for the winner, but another team got 13, so we didn’t win.
As far as we can remember, the questions were:
1. Does England have a 4th of July? Yes
2. How many birthdays does an average person have? One
3. Some months have 31 days. How many months have 28 days? 12
4. Who is the son or daughter of both of your parents who isn’t your brother or sister? Yourself
5. Is it legal for a man living in Germany to be buried in the UK? No, he’s living.
6. Can a man legally marry his widow’s sister? No, he’s dead.
7. A man builds a rectangular house where each wall faces south. A bear walks by. What color is it? White, the house is at the North Pole
8. You have 3 apples and you take away 2. How many do you have? 2
9. How far can a dog run into the woods? Halfway, after that he is running out of the woods.
10. You have a single match. You enter a room containing a candle, a kerosine lantern, and a cook stove. Which do you light first? The match.
11. A doctor gives you three pills and tells you take one every half hour. How long do they last? 1 hour.
12. A farmer has 17 sheep, and all but 9 die. How many sheep do you have? None—the farmer has 9.
13. How many animals of each type did Moses take into the Ark? None—that was Noah.
14. A butcher is 5 foot 10 inches tall. What does he weigh? Meat.
Overall, today’s weather wasn’t too bad. It never rained on us, and we got occasional patches of sun. It also wasn’t too cold. It would have been better for pictures with blue sky, but given the forecast for the next two weeks, this passes for a good day.
One thing that I find interesting is that I’m used to being “Old Man Guilford”. Back home, compared to the people that I hang out with, mostly people at work or at church, I am significantly older than they are. I’ve sort of been that way ever since college, where I spent 10 years at RPI, so compared to the undergraduates, I was “old”.
But here, suddenly I’m relatively young. I think of myself as getting old, being 63, but there are many people here who are 70 or 75. I’m not used to not being “the old guy”.
Also interesting, although not entirely surprising, people seem to keep significantly under-estimating our ages. With how I look and how active Amy and I are, people are quite often surprised to learn our actual ages. They expect us to be much younger.
There is one particular thing that they are doing on this trip, which I think makes a lot of sense. They have a small throw pillow on the bed, although I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it makes the made-up bed look prettier? That pillow is worse than useless for sleeping, but you have to do something with it. On past trips, we had to stuff the pillow into some corner to get it out of the way while we were sleeping. Being in a small room, there were not that many corners available. This time, when they prepare the room in the evening, they take away the throw pillows, so we don’t have to deal with them. Then in the morning, when they make up the room, they replace those pillows. The net effect is that we don’t have to deal with them at bedtime.
Coincidentally, just after I wrote the above, Amy solved the throw pillow mystery. In hindsight, this makes sense, but rather than take the pillows away at night, they find their own “corner” to stuff the throw pillows in. They put them in a bag (to keep them clean), and then put them under the bed. It makes sense to keep them in the room. That way you don’t need to worry about giving someone the wrong pillow.