Posted on Jul 7, 2013 in St. Goar | 0 comments

View of the Rhine River from St. Goar, Germany

I only completed one big drawing during the bike trip. It was difficult to stop for drawings; we stopped for photos, food, sightseeing, but there was not much time to draw. Also, biking that many hours a day was tiring us two desk workers out.

The tiny town of St. Goar is one of many along the Rhine between Mainz (Mayence) and Köln (Cologne). We took a 5-day/6-night bike trip over an easy 200-km stretch, admiring over a dozen villages and castles or castle ruins along the way.

Cologne is where I was born and grew up, so this romantic stretch of the Rhine was my hinterland as a child.

From St. Goar, you look across the Rhine at St. Goarshausen, which is what you see here. This attempt at a panorama failed; I needed another page to fully show the 180-degree view. I had to leave out some hills and houses on the right side where I ran out of room and couldn’t make my two starting points from each end meet up. Still, the drawing gives a good impression of the landscape: villages lined up at the bottom of very steep hills, vineyards up the hills, and castles or fortresses perched above it all.

The Rhine was very swollen this June due to heavy rain fall, and more than once we had to ride through large puddles on the bike path. In some places the water almost came up to the bike path, but I think the areas we were riding through had been spared the flooding that created havoc further south.

I enjoyed all the activity on the Rhine, it’s a real working river with freighters, tugboats, little ferries across, bigger ferries along, cruise ships, private boats, fishing boats, and kayaks. Also bikers like us, cars and trains on all the parallel tracks.

And we saw Canada geese as well as what must be German geese. The geese don’t need passports.

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