St. Goar & the Rhine River Valley, Germany

Hello, All! Time for another episode of "The Garvin Travels." On the recommendation of several friends, we ventured to the Rhine River valley in Germany this past weekend. More specifically, we stayed in a quaint little town along the river called St. Goar. This area is fairly touristy during the peak season, but since we were there before things really get going for the year, it was pretty quiet. In fact, the hotel we tried to book a room at (online) called to tell us that they weren't yet open for the year. So they recommended another hotel that was open, and we ended up being the ONLY people staying there Friday night. It was a bit odd knowing we were the only ones there. Not even the owner stayed - I think she has a home across the street. Anyway, I've never been the only one in a hotel before and it was an interesting feeling. Hotel Hauser is situated right along the Rhine, so we had really nice views:



View from Hotel Hauser from Melanyann Garvin on Vimeo.

After a lovely breakfast Saturday morning compliments of Marianne, the owner of Hotel Hauser, we set out to explore Burg Rheinfels, the local castle. We hiked up through the castle gardens to get to the castle and enjoyed the views back down toward the river.

Stopping for a break (and utilizing the timer feature on the camera) on our climb up to Burg Rheinfels:

In this one you can see Burg Katz in the background (I know I called it Hotel Katz on the video, but it's not a hotel, it's currently a Natural Science Grammar and Boarding school. We were told that it's actually now privately owned by a Japanese family.) The town below, St. Goarhausen, is directly across the river from St. Goar. Apparently on town-naming day, someone wasn't feeling so creative.

A look down onto St. Goar:


Part of Burg Rheinfels has been renovated and turned into a hotel, but there are also original ruins of the castle which was built in 1245! Luckily they provided us with an English version of a guide to the grounds. With this we were able to explore the castle ruins and understand what used to be where.

This was the western wall of the inner courtyard. The arsenal and the kitchen were to the right.


Some sort of cemetery within the castle walls:

"Inside" the castle (using the camera timer again.... Eric's favorite):

A pile of catapults... how neat!

This wall was really tall, but according to the info sheet, it was originally even three stories higher!

And this is the underground vaulted chamber for the soldiers:

And Eric in the chamber. You can't see this, but he's using a candle we were given with our entrance tickets to explore the unlit nooks and cranies (and big huge underground rooms).

I thought this picture was cool b/c you can see the many grapevines growing on the hillsides. The Rhine valley is known for the great wines produced in the area, most specifically, Rieslings (my favorite!).

After all that exploring, we were hungry so we drove south along the river to the town of Bacharach. Not much was open, but we found a great little restaurant and took the suggestion of the waitress for a very traditional German meal. I know you're all bummed that there aren't any menu pictures this time, but here's a picture of what arrived on the table (we had no clue what we had ordered):

The potatoes were awesome, the sauerkraut great, and we found out after eating that those patties were some sort of special pork from the local butcher.

After our Rieslings, Eric ordered a beer. Can you tell how enormous this mug is from the picture?

We wanted to buy some local wines, so the same waitress (man, she was helpful) recommended a little winery up the hill. On our way up we saw the castle in Bacharach.

And then we bought 8 bottles of wine from this place:

On Sunday we went to Mass (in German) at St. Goar's namesake. That small statue of St. Goar is one of the oldest know images of St. Goar. It's older than the church itself and was transfered to the church after it was built.

After mass we started the meandering drive home north along the river. We stopped in Spay, Germany and could see Marksburg Castle across the river. Construction began on Marksburg in the 12th century and it is the only castle along the Rhine that has never been destroyed:


Marksburg from Melanyann Garvin on Vimeo.

We also decided to stop to check out Stolzenfels Castle. Had we known how far we'd have to hike up to get to the castle, we may have decided differently, but you know hindsight. At least the walk up was scenic:

Picture break (love that self-timer):

Almost there....

We made it!

I don't have much to tell you about Stolzenfels because the tour we tagged along on was totally in German. According to our guide map, the castle was destroyed by the French in 1689 and then rebuilt for a Prussian king in 1836. So this castles was much more intact. Some of the rooms had been preserved with furnishings from when Frederick William IV (the Prussian king) lived there. I'm sure much more interesting information was given during the tour, but oh well.

And that was it. We drove home from there. One more thing, all along the drive there and back we kept seeing this sign. We first saw it during out visit to Switzerland and thought it was the name of a town. I had regretted not taking a picture of the sign. As it turns out, it's not the name of a town at all. Does anyone else find this as funny as we do? Say it aloud and you'll figure it out:

Even funnier, it means "exit". he he he