Romantic Rhine & Moselle - Rudesheim

Day11 – Friday 15 August 2024

 

 

The boat cast off 07:15 to cruise north up the Rhine, passing Lorelei Rock, through the Middle Rhine and its multitude of castles.

 

 

We arrived at Rudesheim and moored port side to bank at 13:50.

 

Mooring at Rudesheim: https://what3words.com/oboes.schemers.surface

Siegfrieds Music Cabinet Museum

 

We took the excursion to Siegfrieds Music Cabinet and were taken there by land train. This is a private museum in a 15th Century mansion containing old musical machines which the founder had rescued and restored to working order.  https://smmk.de/en/home.html

 

 

Siegfrieds was amazing. We were split in two groups and led by a top-hatted English speaking guide through the many rooms of an ancient hose housing all sorts of mechanical music machines.

 

The largest were great cabinets that housed instruments and which replaced bands in hotels and restaurants. They, in their turn, were replaced by recorded music, and the guide demonstrated cylinder records and early gramophones.

Along the way we saw and heard pianos operated by punched paper rolls and hurdy-gurdy street machines.

 

I didn’t expect much and this amazing place put on a show for us and stunned with its music machines. If you get the chance to go, grab it. And kudos to Scenic for supporting it.

 

Scenic cabin keys were accepted as tickets for the cable car that went over vineyards to the gigantic Germania statue on the cliff edge overlooking the Rhine.

 

We had seen this statue from our boat on previous Rhine cruises; now we stood next to it. After the cable car ride back, we could wait for the road-train back to the boat or walk. We walked down a narrow street packed with restaurants and back to the boat which was now rafted on the outside.

 

At 18:45 dinner was BBQ on the sun-deck. Actually it’s a griddle on which were cooked two types of sausage, small sirloin steaks, pork steaks, chicken breasts etc. There were jacket potatoes, butter rice, mixed vegetables, salads and breads, plus gravy, BBQ sauce, sweet chilli sauce, grains and ordinary mustard.

 

A long slow queue for food trailed around the sundeck. We got sunburned, pestered by wasps, and had smoke in our eyes. We agreed that, if there is a next time, we’ll eat in a restaurant in the town.

 

The boat left Rudesheim at 21:45