Friday 12th July
I'm desperately trying to catch up on this blogging. The problem is that every day is so full that there's barely a spare minute to read let alone blog. On reflection, the real problem is dinner. On most trips I have blogged of an evening or first thing in the morning. It's actually 6.30 am as I am writing this now. On this trip, we enter the dining room at 7.00 pm, and after four courses and conversation with fellow travellers, it's close to 10.00 pm when we exit. Then there is an hour occasionally, on the open air top deck as we cruise and bed around 11.00.

We are now at the point where we don't know our "bergs" from our "burgs". Four days ago it was a "burg", Wurtzburg. That morning we slept in till 7.00 and therefore missed the Yoga session.

The guides on all our walks have been fantastic. Obviously I have no facts on which to base the next comment, but when has that ever stopped me from suggesting that speculation is fact. Uniworld must vet their guides carefully and only select those that can deliver informative narrations with lashings of humour. Honestly, I've overheard other guides as we clash with different tour groups. Sometimes it's just hearing them as we pass and on others the frequency of my headset switches and I pick them up by accident. For the most part they are dry commentaries. Most of ours have made the walk a far better option to a guide book.

Anyhoo, off to Wurtzburg and the Residence of the Prince Bishop. You know the neighbours who are self made and become filthy rich? The ones with no taste but so much money they decide to put it into their home? This guy combined elegance, practicality and outrageous interior decoration on a massive scale. There are 400+ rooms, and we only toured 8 of them, and that took well over an hour.

Where to start? Photography was not allowed, so prepare yourself for my lengthy "word" pictures. Oh, you always are!

Inside we stand in a vast open hall with towering ceiling and a wide staircase going up to the right. The guide draws our attention to three massive doors on one side and explains that the were added later, and that originally they were just archways through which a coach drawn by a team of 6 horses would enter, stop by the staircase to disgorge the passengers and then do a U turn and exit through the archways again. That's how big.

The guests would now ascend the staircase having been greeted by the Prince Bishop himself. If they were the emperor or family, he would greet them at the base of the staircase. Other significant personages would be met at either the first, second or third levels of the staircase depending on their status. He wasn't there to greet us.

We ascended the staircase nevertheless. Each tread is only about 7cm high but around 40cm deep, so it makes for a very elegant walk up the stairs, sweeping up and around and into the first room designed to impress royalty. An Italian artist and his two sons were commissioned to decorate many of the rooms, and the first in which he paints representations of the four continents that were known at the time on the ceiling above the staircase is primarily interesting because for such a vast painting, they maintained perspective and many of the animals etc. that they painted they had never seen and were based purely on descriptions.

Rather than bore you ridged with verbal pictures, I found a site with photographs as we weren't aloud to photograph or video.

http://megaconstrucciones.net/?construc cion=residencia-wurzburgo

If nothing else, scroll through to the picture of the reception room almost completely decorated with gold leaf and mirrors. All of the mirrors have paintings painted onto the back side of the mirror glass. Totally over the top but also totally awesome. Now for something even more awesome; this room was completely destroyed by allied bombing during the war and has been reconstructed from photographs. Many of theother rooms or at least the decorations were saved beacause they took them down and stored in bunkers for protection. In the case of the mirrors in this room, they were affixed to the walls with glue or whatever that was so rigid that the mirrors shattered when they tried to remove one, so they just had to trust to fate. Fate wasn't with them. In rebuilding, they used 2.5 kgs of gold leaf.

There was time to wander through town for a couple of hours and then we needded to get back to the ship for lunch and an early departure to stay ahead of the lock strikes. As Wurtzburg was fairly badly damaged by bombing, there were only a few interesting buildings to photograph. Ches tried to do some shopping and in the end the best we could do was to buy an "Edelweiss" charm for her bracelet. The summer sales keep rolling on but no clothing appealed.

We ran into Adria on the bridge (originally the oldest in Germany but rebuilt so not sure what claim to geive it), and walked back to the boat with her for lunch.

Meals on board.

Really overboard. There is nothing that you could think of for breakfast that isn't either laid out for self service or couldn't be ordered. Seriously! Same for lunch and Dinner at 7.00 is a four course meal with beer and wine and a choice of two or three dishes for each course. As I said earlier, it takes a good 2-3 hours.

Today we discovered afternoon tea is served at 4.00 in the lounge. Just what we need, more temptation.

This evening, we dined alone and decided we needed to give the deseart a miss. We were about to leave before seeing the menu when the waiter appeared. We said we didn't want to see the menu and be tempted, and as we stood up he said "But there is Creme Brulee tonight". Thanks a lot.

Goodnight Irene.