Assmannhausen and Wiesbaden

Sunday 8 December 2019. It's Sunday morning and with quarter of an hour before we have to get on the coach, we dash down the street to take a few photos of Assmannhausen.

The streets are very narrow and the corners very tight. And the sticky-out bit just above the pink on this building, very scarred from meeting buses, coaches and lorries...

Looking back from further down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill is a level crossing. Railways run along both sides of the Rhine. Our side gets more goods traffic than passenger traffic and the other side vice versa. Time to get on the coach.

Our first stop of the day is a city called Wiesbaden. It's Sunday morning and as yet is fairly deserted.

There is a skating rink and a small Christmas Market, but as yet most of the stalls are still boarded over and closed. Wiesbaden is a spa town and has 14 hot springs. It once had 26 apparently. Anyway, we didn't see any of them...

We wandered through a shopping mall with no open shops and then along a few streets of offices and shops that were also shut and got a bit lost. We saw a Big Wheel slowly turning and that turned out to be shut as well, as we were turned away at the turnstile. (That's as many "turns" as I can get out of a Big Wheel...)

A few stalls of the Christmas Market were starting to open, but it was bitterly cold for walking about.

We found the skating rink again. I confess I've never strapped either skates nor planks of wood to my feet and have no intention of doing so. We wandered back to the coach, freezing, about an hour before we needed to. We weren't the first ones back by any means.

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A Rhine Christmas Market Trip Begins

Friday 6 December 2019. We are picked up by taxi at twenty past four in the morning to join our holiday coach trip to the Rhine Christmas Markets in Germany. Joining the coach at Preston, the first day is spent picking up people and travelling through the Chunnel to France, Belgium, Netherlands and then down through Germany along the Rhine to Assmannhausen.

Our base for the weekend is the Alte Bauernschänke hotel. It is somewhere around midnight when we reach it and I was somehow reluctant to start taking photos of it that night, so this is now Saturday 7 December. There's a light drizzle but it will soon stop. The two lower windows to the right are our room.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no I wasn't clambering about on the rooftops. I hadn't even brought my Spider-Man costume with me... The first photograph was taken from a walkway over the road that connected two buildings that were all part of the same hotel. In fact the hotel stood in the centre of a fork in the road and there was another part of it over the other road as well. Though people in there had no walkway and had to cross the road in the rain, snow and any floodwater that happened to be flowing down the steep roads from the top of the Rhine Valley. In all there were four buildings making up the hotel.

In case you were wondering how steep the hill really was, I should point out that for the last photo I was standing on these steps. They headed up to a chair lift - the high point of the chair lift from nearby Rudesheim, which was the most anticipated of several Christmas Markets that we would be visiting over the weekend. But not today...

In case you were wondering - you were wondering weren't you? - Alte Bauernschänke means Old Farmer's Tavern. The tavern itself dates from 1408, so it definitely classes as "old", though the name could mean that the farmer was old at the time of building... He's not exactly in the first flush of youth here, though he is gamely trying to disguise the fact by blowing at a bubble pipe...

The bar entrance and a smokers' den on the left. We ate evening meals in the bar and on the Saturday night a chap came on to sing and play guitar for around half an hour before he got either got fed up or ran out of repertoire and started playing mp3s instead. (I almost gave my age away there and said "records"...)

One of the other buildings of the hotel. There are no windows in this end of the building so they have painted some on instead. Very effective! Hands up if you hadn't noticed they were false? I thought so... pay attention please!

Ok, it's now 20 past 10 in the morning and we are about to board our Silver Service coach from Leger to be taken for a cruise up the Rhine (on a boat, not the bus...) and then to Boppard and finally Koblenz before we come back to the hotel for the aforementioned meal and singist.

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