We sailed most of the morning and arrived at Passau, Germany, the home of our Captain. We arrived just before lunch and as we gathered after lunch to prepare for our tours, the Captain called a special meeting. Apparently the river ahead was quite shallow and to complicate things further a ship had run a ground. So rather than staying in Passau until the evening, as soon as we left for the tour, the ship was going to leave and start sailing to position itself to start down the river as soon as the authorities gave the “OK”. He could not guarantee we would arrive in our next port to make our tours but he would do his best.
So we left the boat and got on our bus for a tour of the city then a walk through the city center, then we would head of to wherever the boat ended up.
Our tour was not lengthy. We got to see the country side and drove to a fortress and a monastery but they were just short stops to take pictures. Our tour was abbreviated because of the issues with the river, so after our driving tour, we headed off to meet the boat that had successfully made it to the next stop. It had not yet passed through the shallow part or past the grounded boat, but the captain was waiting for us to usher us quickly on board to get under way.
His family had come to see him. He has a lovely 14 month old daughter Emma who was cruising the hall in front of my room with who I am guessing was Grandma. She chattered, laughed, then grabbed my hand to have me join their hall crawl. She was beautiful and I can see why the Captain was even more disappointed in the timing changes than we were. But we cast off quickly and headed down the river.
The captain told us later that the officials had opened the river and we cast off, then they closed it again but as he said, we were on our way, no place to dock so we continued on. At the lowest point, there was just about a foot of water under our boat. We passed the grounded boat after dinner when it was dark, but the Captain came down to point it out. We saw lots of red lights around it. Not sure how they get the boat out and moving, but we made it through the shallow area slowly but unscathed and headed to our next stop, Reensburg.
That is when we got the other bad news. Our scheduled tour of the BMW factory had fallen through so we were going to the Audi factory. For me it was not an issue, I wanted to see the robots and I figured BMW or Audi - I'd get to see what I wanted. But some people were upset and cancelled. I would guess they probably didn't appreciate my opinion of "it's just a car" what's the big deal. Oh Well. Off to Audi in the morning.
Our entertainment tonight was a singer, guitar player, Andreas Spranger. He was fabulous and had a huge repertoire of songs. He started off just himself walking around the room, but didn’t take long to fill the dance floor. Tonight was the night I was made an honorary Australian. The last song was Australian and about being true blue and lifelong friends. I am sure the quantity of alcohol had something to do with it all, but by the end of the song I was "adopted" by the group.
No comments:
Post a Comment