Overwesel and Bacharach, Germany

 Just some fairytale villages with old town walls and castles along a river.  Yawn.  

Oberwesel:

Bacharach:

Loreley on the Rhine

Legend says that above the narrowest and most treacherous part of the Rhine, Loreley sits and combs her hair, singing and bewitching the sailors below, drawing them to their deaths.  

Because this is such a fun and wholesome thing to do, they have a perch with a handy comb for tourists to emulate her:

  

And here's a link to my favorite song about her:  "Loreley" by Blackmore's Night

https://youtu.be/tUhmjmkLnxY?si=9qDJVxQx7uHRhzRf

Rhine Cruise

You can take short boat trips on the Rhine for reasonable prices, especially considering the castles-per-kilometer and the number or beautiful little villages and hillside vineyards.  Some pictures from my trip, only from Boppard to Sankt Goarshausen.  I've also done it from Sankt Goar all the way to Rüdesheim.  Highly recommended.  Note:  round-trip tickets are currently only a little more expensive than one-way tickets. 

My boat:

Various villages and castles:

Boppard, Germany

 A few pictures from Boppard, on the Romantic Rhine:

Other highlights from Vienna

 The Belvedere Palace and grounds:

The Volksgarten with the rathaus in the distance:

Sunset on the Danube, from the fun Donauinsel area, with its "beaches" and swimming docks:

The Globe Museum, with interesting globes like this one, where the Americas are just completely missing, made in Nuremberg circa 1492.  The Ancient Greeks and Romans knew the world was round, and had calculated its circumference very accurately as of about 200 BC, but they didn't know enough about what filled up all that space to bother making a ton of terrestrial globes.  They made a lot of celestial globes, however, showing the stars and their relationships to each other.      

Once Europeans figured out the Americas were there, they did their best.  I say that lightly, but it amazes me how much people could figure out and build and make without all the technology and information we take for granted now.

Botanical Garden, Vienna

One of my favorite parts of my recent trip to Vienna was the free botanical garden, next to the Belvedere Palace and grounds.  Here are a few highlights.  

You can walk into the bamboo grove on boardwalks.  So, apparently, can the bamboo.  

Huge lotus blossoms:

A saguaro and California poppies to make me feel at home.  In German, the saguaro is called "Riesenkaktus." Because my German is soooo great, I looked at the sign and thought, "Travelling Cactus?" Wouldn't that be a more appropriate name for jumping cholla or something?

Turns out I was confusing "riesen" with "reisen." A saguaro is not a traveling cactus, but a giant cactus. Makes more sense but isn't as charming.

An interesting-looking wollemi pine, which was thought to be extinct until a ranger found one in a national park in Australia in 1994!

 

Branč castle ruins, Slovakia

Sometimes Europe amazes me.  

Friends and I were on the way to see two different Slovakian castles when we spied this on a hill in the distance and decided to go.  Might as well see three in one day, right?  Which is approximately three more castles than you can visit in one day in most places in America.