Cruising the Rhine River- Castles for Days

September 30, 2021

Thursday was a day both Sarah and I were looking forward to, as we had planned a day trip boat cruise down the Rhine River.

We woke up early and caught a train into Mainz, where I had been two days earlier, and walked across the bridge to our boat. Starting off we only had to share the deck with 6 other people.

The part of the Rhine we started on is kind of wide, a little industrial, and was pretty windy making the morning cold despite the sun. I brought basically all my layers 'just in case' and ended up wearing all of them.

Once we turned the corner at the little town of Bingen, the river got narrower, the castles got more frequent, and the wind wasn't as bad. It was a gorgeous day on the river, where you couldn't decide which side to take pictures off of because it was all too picturesque.

On that stretch of the river basically when you were even with one castle you could look downriver and spot the next, on one side of the other.

We got off the boat at Saint Goar, and found lunch at a small cafe. We both had a cup of delicious goulash and split a piece of vanilla cream cake.

Then we went for a short hike up the hill to Burg Rheinfels, the local castle.

We had a nice tour around the grounds which had fun stone architecture and views back to the river.

Then we popped back to the dock to catch a second boat headed farther downriver.

Our final port of call on the boat was Boppard, which was just adorable. We had a short time to walk around, and both enjoyed seeing inside their beautiful gothic church.

The next part of our itinerary was taking a train halfway back up the valley to Bacharach.

It had even more small cute German town vibes. We had a short walk down a couple streets, saw the church, then found a restaurant for some dinner.

The Rhine valley is known for its wine, so we got a flight of whites to try.

It was slightly disappointing since we thought that one, maybe two of them were actually good. The others had some funky earthy notes to them that neither of us were overly enthused by. The kasëspatze I had for dinner was delicious though, kind of a German mac and cheese with noodles that want to be gnocchi.

And our table was in a cute grape covered alley with a fountain next to it, so it was pretty good anyway. As a side note, I've discovered my absolute favorite German custom: once fall hits, all the restaurants with outdoor seating (basically all of them) provide blankets for your lap. The US needs to get onboard with this, because it's genius.

We finished eating, headed for the train, had a couple sleepy connections to get us back home in Frankfurt, and fell asleep dreaming of castles.