Day 80 10 june 2015 Nurnberg (Nuremberg)

Lock it in Eddie.  We have left the Danube and entered the Main canal which ultimately connects the Rhine and Danube Rivers.  We went through a couple of large locks today.  Impressive engineering and the photos don’t really do it justice. There are many of these in this part of the waterway.

Had a talk on the European Union from a local historian which was interesting. Elizabeth asked a question about how nervous the Polish people are about Putin’s aggression and his response was that as Poland is in NATO there would probably be moves to station NATO troops in those countries that felt vulnerable (also the Baltic States).

Looking out from the lock to where we are going, an 8 story building, then looking back from the bottom of the lock and then after leaving the lock looking back.

The cost to go through a lock is based on journey distance and number of passengers so it costs just over 1000 Euro for our ship of 220+ Passengers and Crew.  Impressive engineering, photos don’t really do it justice. We were delayed by the volume of traffic on the canal which has increased greatly over time and is set to continue.  The number of river cruise vessels from 70 to 950 in the last two decades. There can be a maximum of 1300. We were delayed so long that all we got was a trip into town and 25 minutes to take photos of the old market square. 

The photos here are of the old wall and moat. In the last photo there are some dark coloured stones on the wall on the left.  These date back to the 20th Century and were aded to stop drunks falling into the moat.

It was OK but we missed out on seeing where the Nuremberg trials and rallies were held and the Documentation Centre.  It only dawned on me today that they must have selected Nuremberg to conduct the trial of Nazi war criminals because that is where the large rallies had been held and the Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of citizenship rights. It was unavoidable that we missed out but these things happen but it was a very late tea. The bonus was that they had to cancel the evening’s entertainment which was a German brass band.