Bacharach and St. Goar

This was my favorite day.  We drove up to the Rhine River to Bacharach another picturesque town and toured around the cobblestone streets.  We saw Altes Haus (Old House) the oldest house in town dating from 1368, the old well, St. Peter’s Evangelical church, ruins of the Gothic Wernerkapelle, and then just kept hiking up until we got to Stahleck Castle which is now a youth hostile.  At one point we hiked up through a vineyard to a view point where I took the above photo.  It was just so perfect, I couldn't stop taking photos. 

We stopped for lunch at a pizza place.  I had some kind of Hungarian pizza wrap thing with some powerful red cabbage that I picked from the pretty picture alone.  It turned out pretty good.  We bought a couple of drinks and the owner brought over some small coke glasses to help share the bottle.  All of the sudden in the middle of our conversation we hear a snap and look over to see that Matthew bit through or broke his glass off in his mouth.  They cleaned his mouth out and made sure his spit out all the glass and not 20 minutes later, Luke bites his.  It was kind of amazing how delicate those glasses were.


St. Goar

We ate a little too long to catch the boat tour down the river, so we took the train that got us to St. Goar in 10 minutes.  Of particular note in St. Goar is the Rheinsfel castle.

“Sitting like a dead pit bull above St. Goar, this mightiest of Rhine castles rumbles with ghosts from its hard-fought past. Burg Rheinfels was huge — once the biggest castle on the Rhine (built in 1245). It withstood a siege of 28,000 French troops in 1692. But in 1797, the French Revolutionary army destroyed it. The castle was used for ages as a quarry, and today — while still mighty — it's only a small fraction of its original size. This hollow but interesting shell offers your single best hands-on ruined-castle experience on the river.”  Rick Steves

Man he was right it was just huge and completely hands on.  Thank goodness for the Rick Steve’s walking tour to get us around, but we took plenty of detours on our own spying dark hallways and secret passage ways to explore.  We lost Chris Silva for a little while until he found us in the dungeon exclaiming that he had found a secret staircase.  We took the dark, tiny, spiraled staircase up to black room, then feeling our way to the back we found another hallway, lit lightly from the archer’s slits in the wall.  Awesome.  This castle brings out the kid in everyone.  

We had also planned to do the mine tunnel tour.

“To protect their castle around 1600, the Rheinfellers cleverly booby-trapped the land just outside their walls by building tunnels topped with thin slate roofs and packed with explosives. By detonating the explosives when under attack, they could kill hundreds of invaders. In 1626, a handful of underground Protestant Germans blew 300 Catholic Spaniards to — they figured — hell. You're welcome to wander through a set of never-blown-up tunnels. But be warned: it's 600 feet long, assuming you make no wrong turns; it's pitch-dark, muddy, and claustrophobic, with confusing dead-ends; and you'll never get higher than a deep crouch. It cannot be done without a light”  Rick Steves

We forgot our flashlights, so we purchased 50 cent candles and down into the mines we went.    Well, down somewhere we went.  Having not read the previous excerpt before we went down what appeared to be a mine tunnel-like entrance.  We weren’t really expecting the three-foot high ceilings and two foot wide walls.  Then when we started seeing side tunnels branching out every 15 feet or so, we thought we’d better consult the book to find out if we were even in the right hole.  We were, but we’d entered the exit so now we were following directions backwards.  We couldn’t stop laughing.  Luke and Matthew could run through the tunnels and none of us could even stretch out our legs.    At one point Luke followed me down a tunnel to explore what ended up being a dead end.  As I tried to back my way out a little I got stuck which made me laugh and blow my candle out.  Chris had the matches, so Luke and I had to feel our way back to the group in the darkness.  It was pretty fun.

We took the boat tour back up the Rhine River where Castles dot the hills all along the way.  The Rhine was so important to trade that it became a popular place to set up a castle and charge tolls for goods passing north and south on this route.  A castle would have great chains that went across the river, if a boat came, the castle would raise the chains until the boat paid the toll.