Regensburg

I’m back, I was only down for a day and some, the good news is that I apparently gave it to Kate, but since she already had the medicines in hand the got a head start on it.

After breakfast, we pulled into Regensburg. We were only going to be here thru lunch, so the walking tour got started at 9:00. Before you hear it in exaggerated form for someone else, I did take a minor tumble in front of a bus who was trying to squeeze by as I inched up the rather steep slope, I lost my balance and danced back in front of the bus before executing a graceful tumble to the ground. I was immediately pulled back up to my feet by Kate, the tour guide, more embarrassed than hurt.

For the tour we walked upstream towards Stone Bridge“

The bridge was built in just 11 years from 1135 to 1146. It was the only river crossing between Ulm and Vienna which made the city, and it’s merchant princes very wealthy.

The little green shop near the foot of the bridge sells sausages and has since 1374. It was probably based on a canteen that served food to the builders working on the bridge.

With the rise of East-West trade with the bridge and North-South trade up and down the Danube the merchant princes were basically able to print money. The merchants built these 6-storey houses (typically only two stories above the ground floor were occupied. See the 4 floors above the first two have been blocked off.

This is the Goliath House; this is actually the third variant which gets repainted every few hundred years to allow each artist to interpret the scene. The original was painted in 1573 by Melchior Bocksberger.

St Peter’s Basilica which is very similar to the one in Cologne further downriver. The weather was much nicer today, not the sunny patches.

On the way back to the ship, we passed a clock store, so I went in. I got a traditional cuckoo clock driven by descending weights but in a blonde color rather than traditional walnut.

We stopped at the Regensburg locks to pick up one group who had and afternoon excursion and then at Kelheim were we waited for the last group. It was here that we departed from the Danube River to cross over through the RMD Canal. The canal was finally started in 1966 and only completed in 1992.

You can see Kelheim on the bottom of the map where we start up the canal. We’ve already passed two of locks going up and the dotted yellow line marks the “continental divide” where the water flows north or south.

Tomorrow morning, we should be in Nuremberg;