Day 10

Weather: 25'C

The plan for today was early check out and off to Koblenz before 830 to purchase tickets for a 4 hour return cruise down the Rhine to Boppard . When making inquiries yesterday the lovely lady assured us it would be no problem to turn up before 0845 to get tickets, in fact, she said that at 9am we would likely be the only people on the boat.

On arrival at the Kasse (ticket) office at 0830 it was clear we were not likely to be the only ones on the boat as we joined the 50 person deep, static line for a ticket. As I looked around we were clearly the only people under the age of 65 by a number of decades and so we decided that maybe this wasn't the activity for us.

Luckily, yesterday when touring the fort we saw people putting tents up and, on further inquiry, was told there was a fair being set up for tomorrow. Although we had already been up to the fort, the fair seemed like a better idea. How right we were. Turns out it was a middle ages fair, one of those kitsch ones you see on Midsummer Murders were everyone gets dressed up and it's all very serious and authentic.....and a bloody brilliant day.

We drank Kirschbier (cherry beer) which tasted not unlike cough medicine, put on authentic middle ages costumes and then looked so good in them we posed for the Chinese tourists as well. Saw the

canons fire from the top of the fort, ate some sort of delicious fried champignon mushroom dish, drank more beer, bought tacky tourist merchandise and generally reveled in the geekiness of it all.

After spending most of the day there we left for Frankfurt to catch up with Danny, Coco and their gorgeous two year old daughter Mia. We walked from their house to a genuine Biergarten in the middle of the forest where the waitresses wore proper leather lederhosen. Unsurprisingly we ate more traditional German food, drank more beer and just generally had fun in the sun.

Fact: Today was a German public holiday and fathers day. It is apparently traditional on fathers day for young people 18-30 to put heaps of alcohol into a pull along wagon, pull it into a park or forest and just get totally sloshed. We met several groups of them on our walk. Very strange!!

I am now typing this from our hotel room in Heidelberg, the windows are open and I can here the noise of people drinking and eating in the open biergartens down below. To coin a well used phrase "Life is good".