Right ... hello. I am writing this from within a police cell in DüsselDorf. I am supposedly in here for saying something inappropriate to a police officer. One of the Police men has kindly let me use his iPad as he feels I have been slightly hard done by. This is all a lie, I am actually in Köln or Cologne in an internet cafe and thought that lieing would make for an exciting start to a blog post.

To beat Heather's static photo of The Beer Bike here is a video of it in action:

So The Beer Bike was in Frankfurt and after that we moved on to Bacharach, a quaint little wizarding town set in the middle of the touristy pretty bit of the Rhine valley. We trundled our wheely bags along the cobbled streets to our little hotel off the market square and made camp, we would be staying here for 3 nights.

The centre of Bacharach. Our hotel is on the right.

The weather had picked up a little too much for my liking and was an unpleasant 68 degrees celcius, but Heather was happy to be wearing her summer dresses and glad to be able to make use of her skin friendly suncream. We went off for an explore of the town. It was very small and we walked the length of it in about 10 minutes. We checked out boat times for the next day as we intended to go up the river a bit and sat and had a drink in a converted merry-go-round. It was too hot to do anything serious and we just sweated the day out sitting and taking photos of wonky jumbled buildings and foreigners.

The Rhine valley's banks are covered in strips of greens vineyards where I think Reisling wine is produced. Wine seems to be the underlying theme across all the towns in this area. For dinner I had a nice beer. We polised off our sausage related mains and ordered a Flamekuche for afters which is basically a pizza-light with no cheese. Back to the hotel we went.

"The hills are alive ..."

Bacharach is surrounded by a big wall with towers and you can walk around and through the wall. This is what we decided to do the next day. Earlier I said we looked at boat times but I think we actually did that on our third day in Bacharach. I probably shouldn't write everything I think down. So we went on this walk, starting off by going up a quaint little lane with a river and wobbly houses and then up into the vineyards and some forest. At the top of the hill to the rear of Bacharach lies Hogwarts cleverly disguised to the Muggle community as a youth hostel. We had a drink there and looked out over the postcard views of the Rhine. About every 10 minutes an incredably long train straight out of a child's train set with trailors consisting of massive gas canisters, container units and big troughs full of coal would role by on one of the two sides of the river. Down the river itself  stretched flat boats would slowy glide up and down filled with coal or compressed garbage. It made the view more interesting thinking that all the crap that the big cities need in the south probably must first come through this valley.

Top of a tower looking over Bacharach.

Hogwarts was at the highest point of the walk and we walked down from it through more vineyards covered in bunches of bright green unripe grapes eventually ending up back in town and ambling back to the hotel to cool off. It was a very nice lazy time in Bacharach, we just ate and drank and occasionaly walked places. On the last whole day their we hopped on a boat for a ride up the river to a town called Saint Goar where a massive ruined castle awaited. The boat cruize was lovely showing off more of the vineyard covered hills and little fairy towns. We passed a non descript piece of  rock. Everyone got up and looked at it and took photos of it because the speaker phone said it had a name and was an important bit of rock. Afterwards the boat played a song about the rock.

We arrived at St Goar, spied the castle and started walking for it. We were desperate to get their quickly to avoid getting caught up in the busloads of Japanese tourists who were on the same boat. We never saw them again though so I can only assume that they all fell through the gap between the boat and the jetty and promptly drowned.

We went for the footpath approach to the castle which was a mistake as it was steep and full of stairs. We should have gone for the Saga-slower-than-walking-but-effortless steam train car thingy instead, but we only discovered this on our way back down.

The castle was awesome. It was nice and ruined but didn't over pander to health and safety like places do in the UK where a similarly ruined castle would have any staircases, tunnels, turretts, rooms and  places of interest railed off with only flat fields of grass and areas that can be easily accessed by Segway open to the public.  The castle was a sprawl of dark tunnels that got narrower and darker and tighter the further you went down them and large cool stone chambers with no electric lights or handrails or frosted bits of glass with painted scenes of monks feeding a donkey in site. We spent most of the morning exploring the ruin.  We had lunch on the castle terrace, walked into St Goar and printed out our train tickets to Düseldorf for the next day and then got the boat back to Bacharach and chilled the rest of the evening away.

Funky tunnel.

The next stop was Düseldorf. It was me who decided we should visit Düseldorf, my reasons being that we had never been their before and that it was close to Köln where we would be flying back from. Düseldorf was crap. Full of non-descript buildings, pedestrian-unfriendly and our hotel, although the most expensive of the holiday was the worst. However I read that Düseldorf had a good opera scene and I think I rescued the situation well by getting a couple of tickets to Boheme in the evening. The first act was tiresome I felt and after nodding off a couple of times I awoke to a more exciting crowd scene with the highlight being a women stripping naked and lieing on top of a piano. After our injection of culture, Mimi dies at the end for those of you have not seen it, we got a drink and retired to our hotel. Thankfully we had just one night in Düsseldorf.

The next day we handed in our what-do-you-think-of-the-hotel survey and caught a fast train to Köln. We had been to Köln before at Christmas time and so had seen the city covered in snow and Christmas markets but it was exciting to see it in the sun. At the centre is an impressive Cathedral and after we dropped our bags off at our nice yellow hotel we had the standard look inside it (the cathedral) and looked at the things that the signs wanted us to look at, I remember the bird-bath of holy water looking particuly manky, I think a kid had poured some coke in it.

We had a drink in a cafe which I am writing about as the toilets were of interest; they were very fancy complete with fluffy personal hand towels and more importantly a row of toilets that had seethrough glass doors on them. Strange I thought, I wondered if something fancy happened when you went in them to cover the door so went in one and waved my hand around and opened and closed the toilet seat. Nothing. I went back up and Heather told me you had to lock the door. I went back down to the toilets and went in a cubicle and locked the door, the clear glass door fogged over with a picture of a samuri. Cool. This could have only been magic. I locked and unlocked the door a few times until the queue of people waiting got tetchy.

On the train into Köln we went over a bridge that had one side covered in hundreds of padlocks of all colours, shapes and sizes. We had read about this in the guide book before. Each padlock is put there by a couple and some are engraved with names and dates and poems etc. I think the train company had threatened to remove them but there was huge public uproar and so they have remained. Our plan was clear: find and buy a padlock get it engraved and attach it to the bridge. We failed to find anything larger than a luggage padlock on the first day and so today after I finish this post I will begin the hunt again with the added knowledge given to me by the interweb. Heather is currently off in the shops and I think there is a fair (fare?) called Cologne Pride which I guess is a gay pride thing but not sure. Lots of tents are springing up and it looks very promosing for lunch opportunities.

Bridge of padlocks.

Oh we also found a Leg shop! In it you could make your own lego guy, so we promptly set about elbowing the kids out of the way to create lego minatures of ourselves. The Result:

Heather decided she was a captain and needed a banana and a magnifying glass.

This will be the last blog of this small trip, internet cafes seem to be a dieing breed in the western world and we hoped to get at least 4 blogs in but what can you do? Let's pretend that we find an awesome padlock get it engraved for free and hang it on the bridge to make a lovely ending to a lovely holiday.