River cruising and Andernach

Yesterday we drove from Bernkastel- Kues all the way to Koblenz along the Mosel. The Mosel is a must in my eyes. Green, lush and beautiful. Small villages and towns reflecting off the water.Vineyards look like rice fields, up on steep terraces as far as the eye can see. Many a castle up on the hills the most impressive being Castle Cochem, that looks a lot like Castle Koch in Wales. There are so many places to stop and its a cyclist dream. Cycle paths the whole way. It is somewhere I would definitely like to cycle the length of. You can see why people would take their time crawling up or down the Mosel. Stellplatz nearly every town and river cruises crossing back and forth. The Mosel meets the Rhine at Koblenz and we decided to travel on to a stellplatz at Andernach. Pulling up it was a mass of motorhomes and we got a great spot parked up next to a little balcony. I think it forms part of the Bollwerk, a fort like entrance overlooking the river below. The town has many beautiful buildings and gateways, and is in parts surrounded by stone walls. I walked through the town yesterday and spotted a TUV, and thought hmm, I wonder if i can get an emissions certificate. So this morning we walked down to TUV ( testing garage). I thought id play dumb, knowing we were probably to old to get one. Yip , they don’t even make them for our age. We decided to try our luck with another. I could tell they really wanted to give us one, but didn’t want to get into trouble. So we gave up and have just zigzagged around emission cities. This part of Germany is insane for the zones, up until now we have been lucky. The joys of having a lovely old van compared to an expensive newer one. Its not all bad we get to see beautiful little places off the beaten track, which is what we like. Its just a pain if you want to go somewhere and its in a zone. Leaving you no where to park. Todays example would be a laundromat, 3 in Cologne all in the zone. Dusseldorf is now out, due to 8-10,000 motorhomes descending on the show and limited parking. We are thinking of heading up into Holland and Belgium for our last couple of weeks. Hopefully a bit cooler weather as we have had a record 3 months of 30 degrees. As kiwis you would think we would love that, but I think a bit of cooler weather would be nice for the dogs. Zoey didnt want to get out of the Rhine yesterday, choosing to swim for over half an hour……