Last nights entertainment was Disco Night, we didn’t last too long with that!!
For Dave and Karen, it’s the sum of a prime and a square.
We travelled overnight and arrived at Rudesheim around 0830. Today was a little warmer than previously with a temperature of 5C (41F). We will have two stops again to day, one in Rudesheim, then later on this evening we will dock at Koblenz for a few hours.
It seems we may have a water level problem again, we need 20cm (8″) of water beneath the boat to continue, currently there is just 20cm, so hopefully we will be ok.
This morning after breakfast we headed off by train to the town centre.
The main attraction for today was Siegrfrieds Mechanical Music Cabinet Museum. This museum houses hundreds of music boxes and mechanically played instruments dating back a couple of centuries. An amazing place. In addition to the usual punched paper playing pianos and organs there were many other machines, the most spectacular of which was one that also played the violin!
You can see the violins in the picture above. There are two sets of 4 violins as only one string is played on each one. There is a ring of horse hair that rotates around acting as the bow.
Some more instruments from the museum:
The picture above can be used for today’s useless trivia lesson. There were no volume controls on the old gramophones so the only way to reduce the volume was to stuff something down the horn, often an old sock. Hence the phrase “put a sock in it”.
Above is our NZ friend Dave, acting as the organ grinder, the monkey is looking very bored!!
After the museum we took a short cable car trip up the hills with the terraced vineyards.
After the trip, it is back on board for a trip through the Rhine Valley.
Unfortunately it is a little cool up on the sun-deck so not much time was spent there. Luckily the ship has a camera in the bow which can be displayed in real time on the TV in the cabin. Combine this with the panoramic windows in the cabin, and we still have a pretty good view.
That sandbar in the picture below should be well under water!
Looking astern are a number of boats following us, now that we are on the Rhine the river traffic has picked up. Perhaps they are just following to make sure we get through!!
Well, we survived the shallow waters and arrived safely at Koblenz. Unfortunately we arrived at dinner time, so didn’t get to go ashore until it was dark. We decided to go for a walk along the tow path and look for our first geo-cache of the trip. We found it! Tomorrow we are off to our last Germab stop, Cologne.