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Friday 3rd May: Bamberg

Thankfully I had a decent sleep and the drops and pills seem to be managing the sore throat ok. We have left the Main river and are travelling through the Main-Danube canal, so many, many locks!

Pretty German snails on the path up to where the buses were parked

This morning we had a short bus ride to Bamberg, which as it’s name suggests, is built over a number of small hills. There are churches on top of each of the hills and it is very old and quaint. Our guide was good today, with a good sense of humour.

The town is renowned for its orchestra, its basketball team and its history of brewing. It also seems to have had a very dark history of burning witches, having burned alive 1000 of its 8000 men, women and children during the height of that craziness. Evidently these poor souls somehow got blamed for a succession of crop failures. More likely stupid farming if you ask me.

Anyway, they have some lovely old houses beside the river, a cathedral and some great old buildings.

The tomb of some archbishop and/or saint
Beautiful carving above the altar in this chapel

A beautiful rose garden beside the courtyard place above
Views out over the town/city from beside the walled rose garden. That’s a large malt factory in the distance that supplies malt to many breweries throughout Europe.

This amazing building is in the middle of the river
The lock is directly opposite the building above

Deliveries to the cellar of this pub go down through a little trap door in the footpath

We had a couple of hours of free time and had a good look round the shops (without buying anything) then had a coffee and walked back to the bus.

Germans far prefer white asparagus to green!
The cafe was old and suited the style of the building
Too cold for anyone to sit outside
Art Deco German style perhaps. Bamberg is a pretty stylish town

Just sailing in the afternoon so it was a good opportunity for catching up with the blog and some sleep.

Typical view out our window between locks. Too cold to have the doors open unfortunately

Mike went to the talk in the lounge about the European Union but evidently nodded off as well!

We had a concert from a soloist violinist after dinner. She was an excellent performer and played a lot of modern and Irish dance classics but was not, in my opinion, technically as good as the violinists in La Strada, but her overall performance won over the audience.