Towns Along the Danube River

When we woke up we had passed through the big locks on the Main-Danube Canal- the original schedule had us passing the locks in the afternoon, but our revised schedule passed the big locks after dinner.  I was able to watch the ship pass one of the largest locks with a lift of 100 ft- a ten story building!  It was like being in a big box when they closed the back lock and began filling the lock chamber- up we went and then emerged into the next section of canal through the rolling hills and farmlands of Bavaria.  The big locks take about 30-45 minutes to enter,fill and pass through.  The many locks and dams on the rivers with normal lifts of 30-40 feet take 20-30 minutes, unless there are other ships waiting; often two or more barges and ships can share the lock if it is long enough.  The water in this high canal has to be pumped up from the Danube, and to reduce the lost water for each lock cycle, about half of the water is diverted into storage ponds beside the canal.

We woke in Regensburg on the Danube.  It was Saturday and they were having a music and dance festival with many stages set up throughout the town.  We had a morning walking tour as usual and then had the afternoon free to explore the town.  Judy wanted to take a nap-so I went back to town after lunch to explore and listen to some of the music- interesting harp and accordion duo, a string instrument band and music from a brass band.  I went onto an old steam powered paddle ship that was built in 1922, sank in 1945 from a mine dropped from a RAF plane, and finally was salvaged and restored in the 1980s.  They had some good books on the Danube navigation-but none in english- I'll have to look harder for a Danube River history book when I get home- the river locks are quite large and navigation has been a major enterprise for many years.

This stone bridge in Regensburg is over 1000 years old-nice engineering, similar to the cathedrals.

The brightest inside of a cathedral that we saw anywhere.

This is back a day at Nuremberg. A clock tower on the cathedral-we had lunch near here.

The next morning we woke in a small town about 20 km south of Passau because the docks at Passau had been flooded two weeks earlier. We took a bus shuttle into town for our Sunday morning walk around tour.  The Saint Stephens Cathedral has a great organ- they all seem to be great far as we can tell, with thousands of pipes- and we stayed for Mass at 11 am and heard the 17,734 pipes organ and the choir sang three songs-with one song a cappella.  It was very beautiful and I hope they were praising God in their hearts.  Judy told me that since we didn't speak German we could go.  We did and walked around more of the town.  

Our guide had shown us the high water mark which was about two feet above the last high water-and the highest water since 1504- quite a long recorded flood history. But if you hadn't known that there had been a flood you wouldn't know that it had flooded.  It was all cleaned up and repainted with shops open.  We went down one narrow alley where there were a lot of doors and windows open.  Some had fans blowing in them and others had wafts of wet basement blowing out.  Judy told me it smelled like our basement after it flooded in Knoxville.

   

We found a nice restaurant and sat out on the balcony and had lunch.  The reason we stopped was because it was a Confidorai (? bakery) where we saw marvels of yummies.  So we had a chocolate cake/chocolate mousse/vanilla mousse/cherry glaze confection that tasted pretty good.

Another sunny day in Passau on the Danube (looking across the river)

When we finished we realized there wasn't much time to see anything else so we just walked across a bridge and viewed the town from the other side and took some more pictures.  Then we walked back and looked for our bus.  We were to have a white bus with a Uniworld sign in the front window.  We walked up and down and up and down for 25 minutes and we  could see no bus or any of our other passengers or our cruise manager.  Judy started getting a little panicky.  We could go back at 12:30 or 2.  We decided for the later bus to see more of the town built on a peninsula between two rivers .  But there was no bus.  Judy asked a bus driver if he spoke English and if he was going to the place we needed to go.  Another man who looked like a tour guide spoke to us.  We pulled out our itinerary which showed where we were docked but it had no phone number on it.  Judy was feeling rather lost and scared, but I pulled out our boarding card which we use to check out and check in and it had a phone number for our cruise manager and the boat.  The man tried both numbers and they rang but no one answered.  He hadn't used all of the numbers so he tried them all and we got a hold of our cruise manager, Wouter.  Apparently, he had counted wrong on the way back at 12:30 so he didn't send another bus.  AHHHH!  He told us to get a taxi and they would pick up the tab.  So the nice man went up to a day cruise office and got them to call a taxi which arrived immediately.  He explained our situation to the lady who didn't speak English and of course we don't speak German-or we would've stayed for the church service, right?  So when she understood where we were going there was a bit of groaning going on.  Then she was talking over the phone to her commander who I assume was giving her a lot of directions-accompanied by more groaning.  Meanwhile, Judy was in the back ready to burst into tears even though we had been rescued and were on our way back to the ship and they said they wouldn't leave without us.  We finally made it back to our ship and all was well.  But now the feeling that Judy always had that we might be left behind had been justified, unfortunately for me, because now Judy may feel compelled to say, "Remember Passau?"  So that was our adventure-an exciting day as American tourists in Germany.  I hope your days have been smoother sailing than ours.

A pretty blue colored church along the Passau- approaching Krem.

We docked in Krem today before we go to Vienna.  It's the same idea as Passau only in this case the lock is not operational that goes from the Vienna City Canal to the Danube.  They thought it would be open when we started out in Amsterdam, but it was not able to be repaired yet.  This is inconvenient for many cruise ships which would normally dock at the City- now we all have to take busses back and forth.   It's the first day of pouring rain.  Boo, hoo for pouring in Vienna.  Oh well.   The rain made it harder to enjoy the Wachau valley- a very scenic section of the Danube.  Not as many pictures on the  Danube River because we sailed at night and because of the rain. We are going on a walking city tour, dinner in town and then a concert this evening.  They'll bus us back at midnight.