Today we entered the Main (pronounced Mine) - Danube Canal; 170kms long with 16 locks with the two largest stepping a staggering 25 metres each. This canal links the North Sea with the Black Sea enabling ships to cruise from Romania to the Netherlands. The canal first took commercial shipping in 1996 and is an engineering marvel. Photos don't do it justice.
But with a large number of vessels on the canal following a routine maintenance shutdown of the locks two weeks ago, it's wall to wall ships. We're running behind schedule and Captain Vlad is stressing. We're not!
We've been in the German state of Bavaria for two days which is Germany's largest state. This is where Ted was born so we have mixed feelings at the moment.
We docked after lunch and took the now familiar city tour with local English speaking professional tour guides. We follow around a person with a lolly-pop shaped coloured sign listening to the commentary through individual headsets called voxes. We keep them firmly around our necks as we have to pay for another if we lose it.
The town of Nuremberg was quite pretty with various (not many) medieval remnants in the city centre.
But the overwhelming memory will be visiting two sites - one, the huge unfinished semi-circular ampitheatre (colloquilly called the Colosseum) built to accommodate future Nazi Party rallies (it was never completed because monies were diverted to the war effort) and secondly, the Luitpoldhain, also known as Zeppelin Field. This is the place where Nazi Party rallies were held in the late 1920s and 1930s. This was quite emotionally overwhelming - many people felt the same. We remembered this place from old film footage showing Adolf Hitler addressing Nazi rallies from the main platform. And we were standing there!
After dinner we departed Nuremburg for Bamburg.