Regensburg

After leaving the tiny town of Engelhartszell last night we passed the town of Passau where views of the lovely Fortress and Abbeys were visible from the boat during our dinner time. Passau is the point in the River where 3 Rivers meet. The Inn and the Llz Rivers join the Danube.

We had a late entry into Regensburg, Germany, this morning, so it was a bit of a welcome sleep in for everyone after the full day of touring yesterday. Just before reaching Regensburg we passed Valhalla (meaning’ Hall of the dead’). This place looks similar to the Parthenon in Athens, a HUGE building, sitting high on a hill overlooking the Danube. The Building was built as a Hall for heroic Germans. It contains 150 busts of ‘noteworthy’ Germanic people and is very imposing and impressive.

We managed to arrive in Regensburg a little ahead of schedule, so quite a few of us left the boat as soon as things were set up, and we went exploring the City on our own. The town is pretty with many narrow streets and alleys, and of course, a few nice Churches. We were docked some ½ km from the Stone Bridge which was built in the 12^th Century and is the oldest of its kind in Germany. We made this our first stop in the town. After walking over and back on this Bridge we then wandered around seeing as much as we could and only stopped for a bite to eat at around 1 pm. We had lunch at the “Old Sausage Kitchen” one of Germany’s oldest Restaurants. We had German sausage and sauerkraut with a bread roll…quite nice (except for the sauerkraut-yuk) On our travels we managed to find a Macca’s (just when we had said we hadn’t seen one), and a supermarket was close by. Interesting thing in the supermarket was that a few people were standing at a machine, waiting. We stayed to see what this was and were surprised to see people feeding empty bottles into this machine and eventually they received a piece of paper back from the machine which we assumed was a credit for the bottles. It is interesting to visit supermarkets in these towns as we find stuff we’ve never seen before. At our visit to the Trinity Church, Dave went up into the spire for good views all over the City. We thought this little place was really nice, not unlike Austria in the style of the houses and the ever present  lovely window boxes filled with flowers.