Today we are back in the Netherlands not far from where we left 3 1/2 months ago. A lovely warm autumn day at last after a wek of cloudy and drizzly weather.
On Monday We continued don the Mosel to the very beautiful town of Cochem which happened to be having its annual wine festival. We had a great mooring in the centre of the town and we walked over the bridge to the medieval town with its fairy tale castle atop the hill.
In the Market square they had setup stalls for wine tasting and we drank a few glasses of the 2009 Cochemer Klostergarden Riesling. Lovely and fruity and extremely drinkable. Afterwards we dropped into a typical German restaurant for a meal of pork trotter (boiled and then roasted) and pork steak.
It was also very tourist place but when we were there the hotel boats that were in port were serving dinner so it was just us and the locals. It is without doubt the prettiest village on the Mosel River.
The next couple of days we continued down the Mosel in drizzly conditions eventually reaching the last lock at Koblenz early on Wednesday morning.
Going through we discovered that the Rhine was in flood with a raging current that picked us up and hurled us downstream at 22km/h. (our normal speed is 10km/h). Barges were labouring upstream and the river was 150cm above its normal level. Town after town passed by until we eventually turned to stem the current which we could hardly do and pulled into a small marina off the Rhine at Mondorf. We were guests of the Pirate Club. It was a quiet mooring far removed from what was going on 200m away.
Next morning we edged our way out to a slightly better day (it wasn’t drizzling) and once more were enveloped by the rampaging river. We got as far as Dusseldorf that day and stopped in an old hafen (boat harbour) that had been converted into pleasure boat moorings. We were right under the famous Dusseldorf tower reminiscent of the Sky Tower in Auckland. We walked the 1.5km into the old town of Dusseldorf and it was a bit uninspiring – probably heavily bombed in WWII, and these days full of restaurants and beer gardens. Still it was a nice walk.
We continued on the river and it slowly eased in strength both because the level was going down and also because we were reaching the low lands where the gradient is much less. All the same we were still going 17 km/h. Then today we called into a favourite place at Bijland Plas, a small old gravel lake off the Rhine just inside Holland, where we are at anchor in calm conditions. A great way to finish off our holiday.
This is the last blog from Le Fabuleux. We are off soon to Croatia and Slovenia for 3 weeks. As we don’t know whether we can get cellphone coverage there we will publish the next blog from the Plitivice Lakes National Park in Croatia in a couple of weeks time or so, where our Bed and Breakfast has Wi-Fi. Then after Croatia, we are off to the wedding of David’s nephew Michael at Lake Bled in Slovenia and then to Frankfurt Airport via Austria.
