This morning I awoke to a stunning mist coming up from the Moselle and partially obscuring the Reichsburg opposite - I wanted to get some photos but to try and avoid waking Colin up, I had to carefully lift the shutters a bit and crawl out underneath to avoid flooding the room with light - lucky there was no-one to witness this!
We drove to Burg Eltz - a castle with the reputation of being the most attractive castle in the area. I worked out where the car park was but strangely despite only have a couple of kilometres to go, the SatNav advised it would take about half an hour. The reason became clear as there was a big queue to the car park but luckily we found on the the last few spaces in a field much further away. We had to walk through woods - muddy in parts - but really lovely with impressive views down into wooded valleys before we rounded a corned and got our first glimpse of the castle which was indeed very pretty.
We queued across the bridge to get our entry tickets. I then queued for nearly half an hour to get some food for lunch (all rather heavy going with a lot of potato/chips and sausage options only). We finally went to visit the interior of the castle only to find a Chris very long queue as the castle can only be visited on an official tour. The queue was long and moving incredibly slowly. We managed to circumvent this and visit the armoury and treasury but would have had to queued for a long time to see the rest so we decided to give up which was very frustrating.
We walked back and as the day had progressed, the light had improved on the castle so much better for photos. Back through the forest to the car and then a drive back down to the other side f the river and a little town called Alken where we had impressive ice cream Sunday (I had only ordered some vanilla and strawberry ice cream!). The final planned stop of the day was another town called Beilstein. This was a lovely place but we were definitely flagging so we decided to call it a day and return to Beilstein tomorrow when we were not so tired.
I had earmarked a supermarket called ‘Penny’ on the return journey so we could stock up for self catering. We found it with no problem although it was not particularly well stocked. We were able to get a couple of steaks but realised when we got back that there was in fact no frying pan. I cooked onions which made the entire apartment smell even with all the windows open and Colin made do with a large saucepan and butter!
It was actually very nice but hard work for our dinner. The big news from home is that there has been an amazing display of the Aurora Borealis visible almost everywhere including Teddington and Richmond. Rather typical that we had to travel to the Arctic Circle in Norway to see them but pretty impressive all the same.
