Day 8 – April 23 Saturday

6am wakeup with breakfast at 6.30 & on the road at 7.30am.  It was a long drive today, with a stop for morning tea not long after we crossed from Holland to Germany.  The German Autobahn is very efficient with drivers always moving over except where overtaking.  Some of the cars in the fast ;ane are very fast.  An interesting thing, most of the cars on the autobahn are station wagons or hatch back style, there are very few sedans.  We drove through a shower of rain but that only lasted 5 minutes, our first on the trip.  The countryside changed from flat, flat, flat to rolling hills then to semi mountainous as we got closer to the Rhine River.  The German farms have a lot of canola planted & the yellow colour really sets off the deep greens everywhere else.  The forests that we are passing look great with the new fresh small spring leaves.  We have seen signs on the road to watch out for deer crossing.

We reached our destination at Boppard around an hour before our Rhine River cruise boat was due to depart so we had a wander around the old town square & I had a white wurst sausage in a real nice bun for lunch, make that two, it was so nice.  The town of Boppard is very old, with one building I noticed dated anno 1519.  The buildings look great & we took lots of photos before boarding the “Loreley Elegance”, our Rhine River cruise boat we travelled upriver for a bit over an hour to St Graats.   River traffic is very busy with barges & boats going in both directions.  This stretch of the Rhine is supposed to be one of the most beautiful, with old towns hugging the inside of bends & old castles standing as sentries looking down on them.  Then we had a short wander around this town & drank in its ancient beauty & marvelled at the old castle above the city & the pink sandstone it was made from before boarding the bus for our trip to Heidelburg.

The old town of Heidelburg is even prettier than Boppard, with even more very beautiful old buildings.  All too soon it was back to the bus & check in at the Marriot Hotel at 6pm for dinner at 7pm.  Dinner was a very nice smorgasbord, then a short walk after dinner, though it had cooled down a bit from the 28C we enjoyed on another beautiful sunny day.