Today we woke to a gurgling sound outside the boat. I pulled back the curtain to discover we were looking out at a brick wall just a few inches away. It turns out we were at the bottom of a canal lock and the noise we heard was the water rushing in as the boat was rising in the lock! It was a little unnerving but not unexpected. We were told there would be locks.
We had a briefing this morning where they finally addressed the geography of the river travel. We began the trip in Amsterdam and quickly entered the Rhine River. We followed the Rhine until yesterday when we crossed into the Main River. The Rhine River continues south to Switzerland. The Main River continues east and between its natural path and a series of canals, there is a way to connect to the Danube and eventually to the Black Sea. This means that over the next several days, we will be using 68 of the 70 locks in this path. The reason for the locks is the different heights between the Rhine, Main, and the Danube. Between Bamburg and the Continental divide, the locks raise the boat
about 575 ft. After the continental divide, the locks lower the boat about 225 ft and connects to the Danube in Kelheim.
It turns out the Viking longships are the same size as all the other operator longships as the maximum size of the ship is driven by the size of the locks. The lock widths are a minimum of 12 meters, so the ships are designed to be 11.4 meters wide allowing a space of about 1 foot on each side. The length of the ship is also limited to the shortest lock so that the gates can be closed behind us. The ship also drafts at about 5.57 meters or about 18.25 feet. This is the minimum depth of water necessary for the boat to float.
The locks are not difficult to traverse, but it does add to the overall time as only one ship can fit in the lock at a time, so high river traffic can cause delays. For this reason, our 2:45 arrival at Freudenberg was delayed until about 3:30. No big deal, but it made for a long boring day on the boat.
to meet up with our guide for the Freudenberg Hike & Garden Visit. This was the optional tour, as the bulk of the people were heading by coach to the Miltenberg Walking Tour, which is just a leisurely walk around Miltenberg, which happened to be celebrating Octoberfest today. We found out today, that including the work hiking in a tour name is the kiss of death for old people. We picked the tour specifically because it was a hiking tour, but evidently ourselves and one other couple (Lee & Mimi from Austin, TX) were the only adventurous ones willing to participate in a hike.
We were the only four that got off the boat and did not get on the coach, but met up with our local guides Daniel and a Brazilian girl whose name escaped us as she didnt talk much. Daniel was great! He took us to his house and introduced us to his wife and 3 children, showed us around his vegetable garden and pointed to a castle at the top of the hill from where we were standing and said that was where we were headed and did we think we could make the trek.
Of course we could! So Daniel led us through town, pointing out the various buildings, architecture, and giving us a bit of history of the surroundings. It turns out he is also some sort of environmental researcher, who does environmental statistics, bit with a background in botany. So he was also able to point out a lot of the local plants, and which ones were actually local, which were transplanted, and which were invasive.
The town was beautiful and very picturesque. It was originally only a small village of about 450 people since the Middle Ages, with all the houses of construction. But after WW2, the village expanded into the countryside and was now about 2500 people. Some of the original houses of the Middle Ages were for sale for only 30k to 70k Euros, but the stit=pulation was that if you bought it, you would need to restore it to the original faade.
