Poor geography

Ok so both of us, upon hearing the words Cologne and Moselle valley conjured up the idea of France but to our good luck both lay withing Germany. What's a little bad geography between friends?

We shifted to Cologne after visiting the Hilgedieks and spent a couple of nights in a nearby campground. It is still such a thrill to find such good campgrounds within a stone's throw of city centres. Cologne is home to the largest cathedral in Germany so we climbed the tower - we are puffing less and less these days. 500 and something steps and we still had energy to walk along the Rhine river through the town.

We have noticed quite a misty type fog hanging about making views and photos not quite the sensations they could be. We aren't too sure if this is just the weather (we seem to recall a similar mist in Romania this time last year) or that we are passing through the industrial heart of Germany, we may never know....

From Cologne (Koln in German) we headed to Cochem in the Moselle valley. We spent an afternoon sampling local wines in various weinstubes throughout the town, in particular the Federweisser (new or young wine). Federweisser is only available for a few weeks of the year during harvest when all of the wine festivals are on -what good luck we have- it tastes like grape juice but is apparently 10%, a case of who spiked my punch really. To our extreme excitement it is sold in 3 litre plastic bottles for anything between 8.50 to 15.00 euro.

We awoke the following day with nary a hangover (falling asleep at 8pm may be why) and hired a couple of bikes for the day.

The entire Moselle river is flanked by bike tracks so we rode as far as we could in one direction, stopping for a picnic and a glass of wine before turning at a town called Alf (a town called Alf!) and heading back down the other side of the river. The journey back involved a few more stops than the journey up for both resting our bones and tasting the Federweisser but we were back for early evening. Upon consulting our map we realised we had cycled about 58 km over the day. Our poor bottoms.

The weather was perfect by the way and we couldn't have asked for a more romantic and lovely day.

Photos and video: The looming Cologne cathedral by night, Eva riding in a straight line, A town along the Moselle, Adam enjoying one of many federweisser, Yep