Cochem, Germany
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Before I even get into how great the Mosel Valley is I have to tell you about of arrival. We had trouble booking ahead and were lucky to have secured a room in
Cochem over a weekend. Inger made the reservation with a woman, Frau Pellny, who spoke about as much English as we did German. About all we were sure of were we let her know when we were coming and she said "no problem". Well, we arrived in town and headed to Frau Pellny's place. She came to the door and told us she did not have any rooms. WTF!?!? She was helpful and offered to find us another room nearby, but when we got there they only had a room for one night and we needed three. About this time I was starting to get a twitch right below my eye. We headed back to the center of town where they have a big board that lists rooms available. We began to call a few of these with limited luck. After about 30 minutes of this a black BMW pulls up and who should step out but Frau Pellny. Apparently, she did not realize we had reservations and had been driving around town looking for us. What a relief! We got checked into our room on the top floor of her house and headed directly to the local wine bar for a drink. The moral of the story here is when ordering a meat and cheese plate in a wine bar, make sure you ask what kind of "meat" it is.
The Mosel Valley was great. We rented bikes and rode from one quaint town to the next. I'll skip over the part where I got a flat tire and had to push my bike 5 miles to get it fixed and go right to the part with the wine festival. The towns in the valley have wine festivals during late summer and fall and this particular weekend there were 2 festivals going on. We went to the festival in Bullay. The wine was great and cheap. We also noticed we were the youngest people there by about 30 years but it didn't matter and we had a great time. By the end of the night the folks running the wine bar knew exactly what we wanted when we came up to the bar.
