It’s a beautiful day, sunny and warm as we start the day while still in Austria. Later we’ll be in Germany for today’s tour.
We stopped about 8AM to drop off those people going to Salzburg for the day. It must have been a large group because it was pretty quiet on the ship after they left. They will later join us in Passau.
Fred has a bad cold and slept in. I brought him cereal and coffee while I had a quick breakfast in the lounge where they serve ‘bistro breakfast’. This is just some of the stuff from the main restaurant menu served buffet style.
There wasn’t much to do in the morning other than enjoy the view. There are so many river cruise boats going by all the time, cruise lines we’ve never heard of. We assume most of these cater to the European market.
In case you heard about a collision between a river cruise boat and a small pleasure craft…it wasn’t us. The accident happened behind us on the river. The smaller craft got the worse of it of course, two dead and three missing. Apparently, the river boat, called the Heidelberg, just kept going though all the details aren’t out yet. From what we’ve seen the smaller boats don’t adhere to the normal passing rules for boating so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it was the small boat’s fault but still the river boat should have stopped.
Fred decided he was just too wiped out by the cold to go on the excursion in Passau today. After lunch he went back to sleep and I went on the tour.
Passau was largely untouched during WWII, only their train station was bombed so they look pretty much the same as they ever did. As we saw in Durnstein, flooding is a major problem. Here are the water levels marked on the town hall’s wall. It’s hard to believe water got up that high. They had a ‘100 year’ flood in 2002 and just 11 years later…you guessed it another ‘100 year’ flood, this one even worse in 2013.
The town is very picturesque, with a fortress, which is now a youth hostel.
There town hall has a beer garden in front of it and it’s right across the street from the water front.
Across the river are rows of houses.
Passau is actually the meeting place of three rivers, the (blue) Danube, the (black) Ilz and the (green) Inn. The Danube is not blue despite the song, the Ilz may appear to be black and the Inn did look a little greenish.
They of course have a large cathedral, St Stephen. Even though it’s Sunday we came by late enough in the day so we could go in and look around. Most of the buildings are in the Baroque style but after the war they didn’t have the money to use gold in the restoration of the church so they used more silver. It looks very nice. Restorations to the interior of the church are paid for by the church, but the outside is paid for by the government.
We got off the ship about a half-hour drive from Passau and came into town by bus. The ship followed later and came into town about 6PM. It was ‘double parked’ next to another river boat and you couldn’t see it. Lucky for me I recognized some of the other passengers and they knew where the ship was but only because they asked. When I got back on, Fred was feeling better having had a good day’s rest.
He really didn’t want to go to dinner and risk coughing on other people so I asked if we could have dinner in our room – they ordinarily do not do room service on river cruises. The food was delivered after 7:30 and was very good. In fact, almost all the food on board has been good.
Tomorrow, we have a relaxing morning and then we’re in Regensburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for the afternoon.
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