There was a beautiful sunrise in Hasselberg, and we were leaving at dawn. Time for me to go out and get a few pictures first in spite of the cold! Not a big hassle. 😉 We packed up the car and were off.
We drove to Mainz (near Frankfurt) where we were returning the rental car. We were on the Autobahn again, for about 100kms this time, with a lot of traffic as we neared Frankfurt. That meant the traffic was a bit slower; probably a good thing! We had a little time to look around in Mainz.
We had allowed some time to go to the Guttenberg Museum:
The doors were open, but the museum was closed one day a week, on Mondays. And this was a Monday. So that was the end of that idea! The town square was pretty:
We stopped for a cup of tea. I was interested to see the sugar they gave with it, I knew about rock salt but not rock sugar:
Then we returned the car – a bit of a saga as there was no designated parking area or agent, so finally we just went into the train station and to the info centre and that was what we were supposed to do!
Something that has surprised me in Europe is how many smokers there are here. They’re not allowed in restaurants etc., but you often see people smoking, especially in designated smoking areas like this one at the Mainz train station:
It made us realise how successful NZ has been in the campaign against smoking. It’s just so rare to see anyone smoking at home!
We got on our train for the short trip to Rudesheim am Rhein. As we were walking to our little hotel in Rudesheim, I took these photos of this interesting old place:
It was only after I took the photos and walked past it that I found out who had lived there: Carl Jung!
We checked into our hotel.
This was the interesting view from our window:
Then we went out to explore, and oh my! It was another very pretty little place!
Quite a lot of tourists here though!
We came across these men making apple cider, they beckoned us in to taste the freshly made apple juice. It was very good!
After we’d eaten it was time to make our way back to our room for the night, and the streets were just as pretty at night!