Monday: October 7
Passau, A Small Boat Ride
At long last, the weather today was perfect. It was mostly sunny,
with some clouds, slightly cool in the morning, but verging towards warm by the
afternoon.
Remembering Sunday morning’s tour, I put on my down vest and down
sweater, which ended up being way too much. I ended up unzipping everything,
and then I wasn’t too warm.
The tour was the standard city walking tour. The cathedral was in
a totally different style (Baroque?) than the ones we’ve seen so far. Instead
of the Gothic arches, we saw loads of very colorful frescos. They had the
world’s biggest church organ, but I think now it is only the second largest.
Unfortunately, they are refurbishing it, so only a portion of the pipes are
currently installed. I think they said that when the refurbishing is complete,
they will have added pipes, and they will once again have the world’s largest
church organ.
The tour ended just outside the cathedral. Amy wanted to catch
the organ concert at 12:00, and I was interested in checking out the
castle on the hill across the river.
The main issue is that we wanted to be back at the
boat in about 90-100 minutes for lunch, because we needed to eat lunch and be
ready to head out at 2:00.
We split up. Amy stayed up there to do a little shopping and
catch the concert. I hurried to the boat, and dropped off my jackets. I changed
into my orange fleece shirt and headed out. It was easy to get across the
bridge to just below the castle. The map seemed to show a trail heading up
to the castle, but I couldn’t find it. (I later found out that the trail was
closed for maintenance.)
I made my way through one of two short road tunnels to the far
side of the very narrow ridge, worked my way around the small river, and on the
back side of the ridge I found the way up to the castle/museum. There was a
steep pedestrian ramp up, and a presumably less steep but longer auto road.
Shortly after I started up the pedestrian way, I took off my fleece shirt, so I
was just wearing a synthetic tee. I got my exercise in, as I was breathing hard
long before I got to the top.
I found it rather hard to figure out where I was and where things
were. I wandered around a little, before finally finding the ticket room, and
paying 5 Euro for admission. I then went to the viewpoint area. There was also
a museum there, but I didn’t have time for that. There was an observation
tower, but I ended up walking past the turn for that, going some ways further,
deciding that I had missed it, retraced my steps, and finally found it.
The ground floor was sort of a dimly-lit museum area, which was
designed to kill you. You gaze was drawn to the exhibits, so you didn’t notice
the unmarked step down until you walked over it and nearly fell. I raced up the
steps to the top of the tower, looked around, and took some pictures.
Lunch began at 12:30, and I figured that at best we would have an
hour to eat, and then 20 minutes to get ready for the 2:00 excursion. As it
was, I figured that I would be about 15 minutes late for lunch, which would
result in a truncated but still doable time.
I hurried down the tower, out the castle, down the hill, over the
bridge, and over to the boat. I got to the boat just a few minutes after Amy
got there. She left me a text message that she was up on the third deck about
to have lunch. The weather was so nice, so they had opened the doors/front wall
of the Aquavit Lounge, and were serving lunch there and on the bow. We were in the
Aquavit area, so while it felt like we were “outside”, we had a roof over our
heads, so we weren’t baking in the sun. We finished lunch with just enough time
for me to go back to the room, change, get organized, and head out to the bus.
I just wore my tee-shirt, and I packed my orange fleece shirt and
down vest in my backpack. We were sitting in the second row of seats on the
bus, waiting for the last people to arrive, when we noticed a
shield bug on the outside of the windshield.
I tried getting a picture of it with Amy’s phone,
but I couldn’t get it to focus on the bug. Then I dug out my camera and was
getting a few pictures. It was an interesting experience, as the bug was
scurrying around, and the people in the front of the bus were watching me, doing
a play-by-play and other commentary. The bus driver suggested I try from the
outside, so went out front and
got some pictures there.
So I ended up with
pictures of the bug’s bottom and top.
The excursion was not as interesting as I had hoped. I think there
was a separate excursion of bicycling, which I think would have been better. We
took a half hour bus ride to a small German town on the Inn river (which flows
into the Danube at Passau). We got on a small
salt barge
and started cruising
up the river.
There were some pretzels there, and several varieties of beer. I
don’t care for beer, but they had some sparkling apple juice for people like
me. We did a short cruise up the Inn, which wasn’t a whole lot different from
the normal cruise we’ve been doing.
Then we did a short walking tour of a small town in Austria,
which also wasn’t that different from many of the walking tours we’ve been
doing. At the end, we got to make some herbed salt. Basically, we dumped a
small bottle with four herbs (thyme, basil, chives, and oregano) into a mortar,
and then dumped in a small bottle of salt. Then we proceeded to grind it with a
pestle. The proprietor said that he actually uses a coffee grinder rather than
a mortar and pestle. On our way out, the proprietor was saying “good
bye...good bye”, so I said back “auf wiedersehen”. He asked, “Sprichst du Deutsch”?
I had to answer “nein”.
Then we went back to the boat. As soon as we got on board, they
started stowing the gangplank. Then we set off. Amy and I went up to the sun deck
to see if we would get any interesting pictures of the city or castle as we
left. Then Amy noticed that they had retracted the wheelhouse, so that it was
low, but not down to deck height. That was when we noticed the bridge that I
had crossed to get to the castle. It wasn’t particularly high. It ended up
being a pretty neat experience. I would say that the bottom of the bridge came
over the ship at basically head height, maybe 5-6 feet above the deck. I could
have easily reached up and touched the girder as it went past
Dinner was special. It was a “goodbye to Germany” dinner. It was
a buffet/smorgasbord. As is often the case with such things, I ate a lot more
food than I would at a normal dinner. Some of the wait staff were also
wearing traditional clothes: Dirndl, and Lederhosen.
Now we are up in the lounge playing another group game, where for
a series of questions, each team is trying to give the answer that they think
the majority of teams will answer.
The game was actually quite a bit of fun, as the other games have
been. In the other games, we came in one point below the winner. This time we
broke our streak and came in two points below the winner—not bad, but not the
winner either.
