Our Danube River cruise ended in Regensburg. Having seen the river at this point I am surprised that it isn’t the end of the line for everyone. I can’t dig up the quote but I remember reading Mark Twain’s thoughts on what they call rivers out in the western United States; having seen the Mississippi river, it was strange to him that people would refer to tiny little creeks that even disappeared sometimes in the summer as rivers. The Danube isn’t quite that tiny but still, doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room to work with on that thing.
We spent the first part of the morning on the ship-arranged tour of Regensburg. Our German tour guide this day was less no-nonsense than Daniel but was very nice. She showed us the Roman bits of Regensburg along with several patrician towers, the fanciest way to flex on your neighbors in the 13th century. There was also the Stone Bridge, Regensburg’s medieval wonder. It is a nice bridge though when I was talking about river navigation in the second paragraph this was more specifically what I was talking about.
We popped over the bridge to admire some of the sights but the real excitement was on the southern side anyway. There was the salt shed that was the heart of Regensburg’s medieval economy and which has a very neat little visitor center inside. There is also more importantly the thing I was most excited for in Regensburg, the Historische Wurstkuchl, i.e. what is probably the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world. They have been slinging meals for 900 years (sausages for only about 200 but boiled meat before that). We got lunch there, with the sausage and sauerkraut raising spirits slightly dampened by the rain.
Tell you what though, the REAL gem of Regensburg is the variously named Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum, or Danube Shipping Museum. This thing was so great. It is not hard to find, it is right on the river there downtown, but it did not seem to be very well-visited. My super amazing wife and I were the only ones onboard when we visited in the middle of the day. The museum actually comprises of several ships, but the flagship is the paddle steamer Ruthof, so you walk across the brow and pay your entrance fee there. That’s all where the very tiny little gift shop was, which delightfully carried lapel pins! (of the stick pin variety)
The ship was so great. It acted as a towboat on the Danube, and so would pull along barges transporting goods. I’m pulling these details from the above-linked website, but it was originally built intra-war, struck a mine during WWII (who knew the Danube was mined), and sat on the bottom for 12 years before being raised and then was in service all the way until 1973. Which is amazing when you consider its heart is a horizontal, double-boiler, double (?) expansion steam engine packing, apparently 800 hp, and again driving paddle wheels. The ship is pretty big too, and must have been a behemoth to navigate on the river with a two of barges behind.
But it is not a ship museum but a shipping museum, so the first part has tons of dioramas and ship models and other information about Danube shipping. They have models of shipyard and of the salt fleet we learned about in Passau, and even more fun stuff like schiffmühles or ship mills, a moveable river-powered mill. The museum documents a whole river-bound history and culture I don’t think you’d ever think about if you didn’t look into it on purpose, what with the modern world rending a lot of these things obsolete.
After the navigation museum the rest of the afternoon wound down with some wandering around Regensburg. I admired the Kepler house from the outside and looked at some more Roman walls and the like and there was some final bit of souvenir shopping to do. Our final dinner on the Viking ship Tor was a nice time to say goodbye to the crewmembers that had treated us so well during our visit, and finally we returned to our rooms to rest for the next day when we would finally strike out on our own once again.
