Tuesday 28th of June Mendig to Bad Durkheim
Life of the semi retired or is that unemployed, we managed to do one tourist attraction today and that was a tram ride that lasted 3.5 minutes. By time you get up and check the social media 
(yes, Mendig has recovered from its technology overload), eat your high-fibre breakfast and join the queue to dump your motorhome-waste, half the day has gone. Then it is off to the Aldi at some way-point destination, called Bad Ems, for some free entertainment. Thank god this one puts pictures of animals on the meat packs, pictures of recognisable things on the pate and even the names on bakery goods appear identifiable. We even remembered to cash in the empty soda water bottles.
Today we are venturing south and inland to scoot around France towards the Black Forest. However detours are always a necessity especially now we have found some hills. Wiesbaden was the first stop for lunch and laundry and then scaring the locals by taking the motor home around their very narrow one-way streets.
Wiesbaden or Neroberg has the oldest water ballast-driven cog-and-rack railway in Germany. 
It goes up a steep hill and you get out and see some sights ie. a Russian Church, rope climbing course in trees, bush walks, a cave etc. We did the bush walk to do a geocache and see the church. To get back down the hill you catch the next tram car but the driver has to check how much water to weigh us down with in order to get the next paying customers up the hill. When you get down he dumps the water and it is pumped back up to the top. Apparently the passengers have to average 75kg each; the ticket salesman must have used his eye-onometer because we didn’t have to step on scales. The views on the way up are spectacular, way more interesting than the couple opposite us who chose to fondle each other’s crutch rather than admire the view.
The next attraction was to be another tram ride but time passes you by and then, next minute, it’s time to park up again. 
After passing through Worms and with Roger nearly knocking himself out on our van designed for anorexic dwarfs we headed to Bad Durkheim for the night. Lovely grape (wine) growing area with a massive wine keg that holds 1,700,000 litres (yeah right, it is a building) and a big saline graduation tower; look that one up on Wikipedia if you are unsure what it is, I did because there was no sign in English. They have lovely gardens and a massive area in which, we discovered after seeing a large electronic countdown timer, they hold the world’s largest wine festival.
| PHOTO GALLERY |
| Previous page |
Seen in carpark - cute
Bad Durkheim stopover
Neroberg Funicular
Weisbaden from the funicular