Day 7. Regensburg

     Last night the ship got underway almost immediately after our reboarding after our side tours. The upper deck had been leveled, all the rails, chairs and shades had been removed. This means we cannot go on the upper deck for a few days for safety reasons. And the very low bridges. Previous bridges had about 5ft. clearance so you could sit on deck and not hit your head. Couldn't stand up of course. Now the decks had to be cleared down to 10cm. That's centimeters. Very low. We slept through the low bridge passages last night. I thought we might have slowed down a few times but we didn't look. 

     Upper deck almost totally cleared of safety rails, chairs, sunshades and anything more than a few inches high. We're told it will be about 5 days before we can go up there. 

     After breakfast we got started on our morning walking tour of Regensburg. Our guide was Danish/Polish woman married to a Bavarian. She had just returned from a 5 week vacation visit to L.A. She was very nice, articulate and knowledgeable but never ever stopped talking. Ever. 2 hours without breathing. We opted for a slightly longer tour that mentioned Jewish history and locations in the city. It only added a little more time to the standard tour because a lot of Jewish history was removed long ago. 1560ish was when they were thrown out. 200 families. A few hundred years later they were invited back only to have the Nazis take over in the 1930s. 

     Docking in Regensburg is not on the through route of the Danube. The river splits into several sections through the city making part of the city on islands in the stream. The branch we docked on has vertical clearance restrictions so when we departed we had to back up a ways to get back to the main channel and then go around the city through a lock to continue up the river. Low overhead clearances and narrow locks. The main city is a bit hilly with slippery (again) cobblestones. We were told the city's history with white gold (salt) and how the area developed. It's newer than some the earlier river cities. By about 500 years. That is: just after the first millennium CE. 

     Part of the Roman outer wall about 500 CE. The edge of civilization. It faced the Germanic tribes (barbarians).

     Another part of Roman fortifications.

     The Stone Bridge. Oldest in Germany.

     Relief map of Regensburg.

     Mural on the wall is about 1500 years old. Renewed several times of course.

     Inga

     A merchant mooning his neighbors. Not friends with them. 

     Memorials in the roadways to Jews taken from their homes to Concentration Camps and murdered by the Nazis.

     Part of where the footprint of the Synagogue was. Now a memorial.

St. Peter's Cathedral. Not a lot of gold. Mostly silver. Gothic not Baroque as our previous cathedral/churches were. A lot of stained glass. Also the largest hanging organ in the world. The organ doesn't hang. The pipes do. Nowhere near the largest organ, it's the pipes that are specially hung. No double entendres intended here. 

     Not too long after we returned to the ship we started lunch and the ship got underway. We dined with a new-to-us couple from Michigan. Several locks and very low bridges brought us to Kelheim where we stopped for a short while to pick up folks that had taken one of the side excursion/tours. Some had gone to Munich and were returning. I briefly got off the ship while we waited for the buses. Carol stayed aboard and drank. 

     Shortly after all were aboard we departed and went into another lock. This one was the boundry between the Danube River and the canal system that will get us to the Main and Rhine Rivers. So we are no longer on the Danube. There will now be narrow passages and low bridges. Going through the first few locks last week was interesting but now there are too many and we've mostly stopped paying much attention. The total is 67 or 68 locks depending our future route. We've already been through a few. 

     Interesting dinner with our semi-regular companions, Peter and Wendy, and a new-to-us couple who are very young. Mid 40s. Babies. They have an interesting lifestyle travelling around the world living relatively long term in foreign countries and needing only computers to do their jobs. They are U.S. citizens who are not in the country more than a week or so each year. Interesting. 

     Tomorrow is Nuremberg.