June 4

We got up early today, had a quick breakfast then headed to the bank and Hauptbanhof.  We chose to take a bit of a tour along the Rhine today by train, to see some castles and smaller cities.  The first city on our list was Oberwesel, with the castle Schönburg and a quaint town to boot.  There were some museums there and a city wall that remained as well.  We ended up walking up to the castle, which is now a hotel and restaurant, for a great view of the Rhine river valley.  There was a small walking path down the side that we never would have seen coming up, which we took down and was much quicker of course.  There was a small farmers market in town, where Joe bought some apples, which were tasty.  We took a pass on the museums in lieu of walking along the wall, seeing a tower and heading by train to the next town, Bingen.  You can actually see Bingen from the Bismarckturm in Ingelheim.  Bingen was pretty cool, because there was this massive park along the Rhine with a skate park, sports fields and what looked like a community garden, partly planted by school children.  We took some pictures of castles both in and along the river, then walked along the Rhine to Rhine-Nahe-Ecke, the corner where the Rhine and Nahe rivers meet in Bingen.  There are quite a few of these corners in Germany that we've seen so far.  They are typically breezy and very nice places to sit and watch ships pass by.  After a brief respite from walking we headed into town and walked up some more, (walking up hills has been the theme of my time in Germany so far, when it has come to sightseeing) because every cool thing to see is high up.  We walked up to see Burg Klopp, which offered another fantastic view.  The city and the whole valley was quite visible.  After that we were pretty castled-out, so we went for a walk past the Basilica St. Martin before heading back to the train station and a ride in air conditioning (rare here) back to Ingelheim.  Arriving in Ingelheim, we took a bit of a rest, I cooked some chicken and spaghetti, then we headed out for a brief tour of the nearby area, and even managed to find an ALDI much closer to me than the one I had gone to before.  At this point it was decided to head to a Biergarten in town.  Previously I'd had no one to have a drink with, so we took the opportunity to head to a Greek biergarten for a sample of the local pilsener and to hang out for a while.  When we first arrived, we screwed everything up by saying by mistake that we were here for food, which we were not, then giving our orders to two different servers.  Everything ended up turning out alright though, and we received only one bier each.  They also brought us some sort of Greek shot, with an indeterminate amount of alcohol in it.  It smelled and tasted like those green gumdrops, and I think is called Uzo or something like that.  Twas a nice and relaxing evening.