Travelling: Heidelberg and the Rhine

Around the middle of July, I was in Heidelberg in central Germany for a conference of all of the students in my exchange program, about 150 Americans and 60 Canadians. The hostel was a busy place and I met a lot of new travel buddies ... a few pictures here….

Our time was filled with presentations from the German Academic Exchange Service, the embassies, and German industry, including tours … some people got to see exciting things like cars being built by Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart (though I ended up at Heidelberger Druck, a printing press company, where building a two million-Euro printing press is certainly impressive, but not quite as exciting as an S-Class Mercedes…).

Heidelberg is a nice university town filled with old buildings, a castle, and lots of tourists … we spent evenings wandering around the city and through the hills, touring the ruins, and visiting the city’s “cultural brewery.”

Heidelberg

I took a leisurely trip back to Kiel, stopping first in Frankfurt to see Germany’s skyscrapers, then on to the Rhine River. The Rhine gorge is a beautiful stretch of the river in Western Germany as it flows north toward the Netherlands and North Sea.

My first stop was Mainz, an imperial city during the time of the Holy Roman Empire. It is the place where Gutenberg printed his famous bibles in the 1450s, several of which are in the local museum, which I stopped at for a second round of printing presses….

From there I took the train to a little medievalish town on the banks of the river called Bacharch, where I jumped on a tour boat making its way down the river. The view in this area is quite spectacular: the gorge is green with vegetation, while old towns line the river banks and castles top the hills!

The Rhine

I stopped at the town of St. Goar to visit a few of the castles, including Burg Katz and Burg Maus as well as Burg Rheinfels … once the River’s largest castle, but now only ruins (thanks to the French). I stayed overnight in the town and hiked up the valley, here you can see a spectacular panorama with all three castles (and a fighter jet, which came roaring down the valley just as I took a photo).

I also detoured down the Mosel River briefly to see one of Germany’s oldest towns, Trier, near the border with Luxembourg. Trier was a Roman capital and boasts gates and churches that are nearly 2000 years old!

One last stopover in Cologne for a final picture of the Rhine with the city’s famous cathedral, then some sleep as the train made its slow way back to Kiel...

Check out the best-of photos here…

Cologne and the Rhine