Wednesday 23rd April 2014 We woke up to a lovely warm sunny morning again, we have been just so lucky with the weather. We arrived in Melk early this morning while we were eating breakfast, this town has been an important spiritual and cultural centre for over 1000 years. Melk Abbey dominates the town being high on the hill and seen at every turn, where monks have lived and worked continuously for over 900 hundred years. The abbey has been destroyed sev...

Tuesday 22nd April 2014 A bit of a cloudy morning as we arrived in Passau a bit ahead of schedule at 7.00am. Today we are off on a coach to Salzburg approximately a 2 hour drive. The drive to Salzburg was beautiful, rich farm land, very green, forests so pretty dotted up on the hillsides with every shade of green you can think of, snow capped mountains in the distance. On arrival in Salzburg our guide led us into the very old beautifully preserved med...

Monday 21st April 2014 Another lovely morning a bit cooler than yesterday but sunny and I think will be warm once the day wakes up. Not long after we went to bed last night there was a horrible scraping/screeching type sound, this morning our very entertaining Cruise Director, Arno told us how the bridge of the boat, caught under a particularly low bridge last night due to some hydraulic problems. He assured us that there was no danger to the boat and th...

Sunday 21st April 2014 We arrived in Nuremberg when we were eating breakfast at 7.45am, another warm sunny day Nuremberg is the 2nd largest city in the German state of Bavaria, most of the city was destroyed during WW11 in only 90 minutes, many of the historical building seen today have been rebuilt using the same stones. Hitler chose Nuremberg for his annual Nazi party rallies and built a massive circular structure next to a manmade lake, which was neve...

Saturday 19th April 2014 We woke this morning to brilliant sunshine and today we are having a walking tour of Bamberg later today. After breakfast we had a talk from a Dr Marcus Urban on how the Main/Danube Canal was built and developed. We both found this very interesting and quite an engineering feat. Later in the morning we were shown another German tradition Bavarian "Fruhschoppen" which is traditional German sausage, pretzels and smoky beer. Many...