“On the lower reaches of the Rhine, where the banks of the great river start to lose their smiling countenance, where hills and cliffs with their audacious ruined castles rise defiantly exuding a wilder and sterner dignity, there lies, like an eerie legend from a bygone era, the gloomy and Read More …
Basel is the last Swiss city on the Rhine, and is about 380 kilometers downstream from the source of the Rhine in the Swiss Alps. Below Basel the Rhine leaves Switzerland, flowing north, and for the next 170 kilometers it forms the border between France and Germany. The distance along Read More …
Here we are looking north, that is downstream, from the walkway up on the railroad bridge. The city of Mainz is spread out along the left bank of the river, and off in the distance on the right bank you might just be able to make out the city of Read More …
Around 1800 the German Romantic author Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842) wrote his ballad “Lore Lay”, which begins: Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt’ eine Zauberin Sie war so schön und feine Und riß viel Herzen hin. Which means more or less: In Bacharach on the Rhine there lived a sorceress. She Read More …
In 1840 the great French novelist Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and later Les Misérables, spent three days in Bacharach and wrote an enthusiastic description in his book Le Rhin (The Rhine), first published in 1842. “I have spent three days in Bacharach, a sort of Beggars’ Headquarters Read More …
Besides going by train or bicycle, another great way to travel up or down the Rhine from Bacharach is to take one of the regularly scheduled ships run by the Köln-Düsseldorfer (K-D) line. In the summer months they run five ships a day in each direction. Ships going downstream (north) Read More …
Burg Stahleck, on a hill above Bacharach, is one of two or three dozen castles (depending on what you count as what) in the Middle Rhine Valley between Rüdesheim and Koblenz. There has been a castle on this hill since the eleventh century, if not earlier. Stahleck (which literally translates Read More …
The Marksburg is one of the many castles on the hills overlooking the Rhine River. I took this photo from the train window on my way to Koblenz. Of course I could claim that this photo was the result of my consummate skills as a photographer, but actually it came Read More …
The city of Bonn is on the Rhine River at kilometer 655, which is the approximate distance from Lake Constance (Bodensee), where the numbering begins. Between Lake Constance and Bonn, the Rhine has been joined by numerous tributaries such as the Aare, the Neckar, the Main and the Mosel (to Read More …
When the French author Victor Hugo arrived in Cologne in 1840, he did not immediately go looking for the Rhine, as I had been expecting. Since his book was called Le Rhin (The Rhine), and Cologne was the first place he visited that was actually on the Rhine, I was Read More …