Beautiful place eh?
Day 200 (Wow! DAY TWO HUNDRED!!!!)
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Heard on CNN tonight that there was a fatal plane crash in Phuket, Thailand..Are there any Australians involved?
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Koblenz, Germany
What a day it's been!
We're in Koblenz!
And how we got here was....
After going for our walk around Frankfurter we went to the main train station and organised our train ticket to Mainz and ferrz ticket to Cologne...
So we caught the midmorning train from Frankfuter to Mainz...
Then once we got there, we caught a taxi for 8 euro's to the ferry (it's so easy getting a taxi after all our usual walking or navigating ourselves on busses and trains!!!) and then waited for the scheduled 11.30am ferry...
Which was late!
And our tickets stuffed them around because we bought them at the train station and not the ferry terminal so they got confused.....
Which is when we started wondering where all the lateral thinking and organisation was.....etcetc (we got pissed off basically as we were getting tired of travelling and conducters looking at tickets like the eurail and getting confused!)
The guy told us to leave.
We held our ground and stayed ON.
Management was called...blah blah blah...words were spoken...we said loudly how we'd paid 48.50 euro EACH for our tickets and we were going to go from Mainz to Cologne with them! LIKE IT OR NOT. Greg was NOT budging! We paid and we're going. Gee we're getting assertive.
So..on we got..with everyone looking.....us screaming all the way....people cheering, clapping at the show....(hehe not really, that just sounded good! But it was close!)
The Route we took!
We settled down on top of the ferry to gaze at some of the best scenery on the Rhine River...SO SO Gorgeous.....all was almost forgotten...
Until Greg got summonsed to the management again......not me, just GREG! To talk about bloody tickets...I would have gone along but i stayed with our luggage.
It got more and more relaxed as we cruised further along the Rhine, looking at the fortresses, castles, vineyards...
Greg finally came back. All sorted after he negotiated his way around the small problem. Which they were still dubious about. It must have been the first time someone had made a booking for the ferry at the train station! And it sounded like Greg handled it beautifully, explaining it all, reading the small print....convincing them they were ignorant of their own system.
But after that.....
We sampled the ferry food (delicious) and drank the region's beautiful red wine. (also delicious!) and admired the view, which i might add, is on UNESCO's world heritage site.
We changed ferries in Rudesheim to another bigger boat (which they called a ship) and merrily cruised further along the upper Rhine...soo beautiful....
This trip is so worth going on. So put it in your 'To Do's'!
All the hassles of getting on the boat..and then again when we changed ferries in Rudesheim was forgotten....
Until, we were told we couldn't go all the way to Cologne...we had to get off at Koblenz..
Which is where we are now!!
We got new tickets in the end so there will be no confusion!
So...we finish our ferry leg on the Rhine River tomorrow....when we go to Cologne, then we'll be training it to Amsterdam! And we have to start paying...no eurail, gosh, i hope we don't forget!!!
Life is so exciting life isn't it?
The hotel where we are now, is really nice.
We got it through the Tourist Office here in Koblenz.
That's one thing, Germany has the BEST tourist offices. They're so helpful and don't charge commission on booking a hotel.
This hotel also has free internet..so, as you can see by my blog updates...i'm making good use of!
But now....have to write a nasty letter to London because the buggars have renegged on a booking we made there due to 'London going crazy over the past week with all the bookings to their website!'
To me, that doesn't give them a good reason to go ahead and ask us to pay an extra 15 POUNDS per night! (And from my previous complaints before you will know the pound is outrageous...and for every pound we pay $2.50!)
Grrrrrr........
My LEO Savage is going to come out when i reply and tell them just how unethical i think they are being..........................
I'm off to bed now....we have the morning to explore then we're off again...
Nighties, see you in The Netherlands....:-)
