Koblenz to Cologne

Friday 22 July
On the bus at 8 am to visit the Garden Show at Koblenz with our German guide with the Irish accent, Sebastian.

The garden show is held for six months every two years in a different city.

Some of the beds were very colourful while some of the exhibitions had themes relating to sustainability. One exhibition portrayed ways of making interesting gardens in cemeteries.

The cable car joins two sections of the flower show across the Rhine.

Koblenz is at the junction of the Rhine and Mosel rivers.

Three sections of the Berlin Wall stand in the garden as a graphic memorial.

We visited a church built on the site of a Roman Temple. Neolithic finds have also been made in the area.

We travelled to Cologne via Bonn. US soldiers occupied the city after the war.

At Cologne we went for a guided walk to visit the Cathedral which took 600 years to build. During the Second World War some of the glass windows had been removed and safely stored. The Cathedral was damaged and has been repaired. It is a beautiful building and replaced an earlier Cathedral building while at one time a Roman Temple was built on the site.

Many Roman remains in the city. When an air-raid shelter was built a complete Roman mosaic was discovered and has been preserved in the Romanic Germanic Museum. 

The old town hall was also built on a site that had once been a Roman governance building.

There is also an excavation of medieval Jewish sites n the town which will be incorporated into a museum.

A special cocktail gathering was held before dinner followed by the Captain's farewell dinner. Then off to Amsterdam at a great rate.