notamermaid

So, to Divitia and Deutz. The now suburb of Cologne called Deutz is on the right bank of the Rhine and has modern housing and a modern embankment but I recommend getting over there for a splendid view of the Dom and bridge. There is an association that has helped with establishing a "Historischer Park" with a model of the old fort Divitia, for some photos: https://fhpd.de/projekte/ein-bronzemodell-fuer-den-rheinboulevard/ This coming Sunday monuments all over Germany are open again, many of them normally not accessible to the general public. Some have guided tours, some have even drinks and snacks on offer. This is what is happening in Deutz: https://www.tag-des-offenen-denkmals.de/event/cllmlvl9t000emp0fs31xixqv You need to book in advance. But other places of interest are also open in Cologne that may be easier to plan. Fascinating may be the old ship in the harbour that is being renovated called MS Stadt Köln. From this page you can go to the map at the top (Denkmalkarte) and roam around Germany. notamermaid

Pfelling gauge at 340cm. A splendid warm day in Germany with no clouds of note anywhere in the sky where I am and no signs of them on the radar either. ☀️ notamermaid

Welcome to Cruisecritic. As mentioned by previous posters, this should be okay. Problems of note may be between Straubing and Vilshofen, within which lies Pfelling and the river gauge I regularly mention. On the map this section is between Nuremberg and Passau, i.e. a small stretch of the river only. Ship swaps then tend to happen between these two major cities for logistical reasons. In bad drought Austria and Budapest could have problems. This could see Viking shortening the sailing and using a coach to take you a short way. For now, the river looks good. October as our host jazzbeau has mentioned is too far out to give any forecast. So general idea is in short: your itinerary should be fine, drought with low water will be if it happens (and could well do in October) not where you will be sailing, but a very bad spell cannot be ruled out. Oh, and yes, no worrying please. 🙂 Viking is very experienced with plans B and C. Have a great cruise. notamermaid

Thank you for the link. The frontier has of course long gone but I always claim I can still sense the difference between the civilized world and the wild hills of Germania Magna. 😁 Staying with the Romans but back to Cologne. On Saturday and mostly Sunday you can visit Roman remains in Germany as part of the "Tag des offenen Denkmals", among them modern day Cologne-Deutz. I will explain this in a following post. notamermaid

A quick look at Kaub gauge. Levels as predicted two days ago - now at 195cm, so all good. Decline is definitely slowing down. Long-range forecast suggests figures will most likely stay above 100cm well into the second half of September. notamermaid

Thank you. Just to expand a little on the Roman places and their names. They are a bit like beads put on a string along the Rhine - and there mostly on the left bank. Worms, Speyer, Koblenz, Andernach, etc. are all Roman with sometimes going back to Celtic words. But you probably know that Baden-Baden further inland on the right bank but within the boundaries of the Empire determined by the establishment of the Limes frontier was used by the Romans, well, the thermal springs. Simply called "Aquae" - the Baths. And you can visit the ruins: https://www.carasana.de/en/friedrichsbad0/romanbathruins.html There is another aquae - Aquae Mattiacorum, modern day Wiesbaden. Like Baden-Baden it is still a well-to-do town with the baths at the centre of it. Okay, both have also a casino... notamermaid

Pfelling at 360cm. All good for now. After a fast drop, the decline of the level has slowed down. notamermaid

Good question. Often Roman parts of words or even older Celtic parts are in a name but with those two I have no idea. Would be something for a dedicated linguist. Could both have something to do with a Germanic stem that relates to water or an "Au(e)" - that is ground close to water and/or inundated frequently by water. Or a complete coincidental etymology of them both. They are in different dialect areas, so that may make sense as well. One river of which the Roman original name is well-documented is the Vinxtbach. It was a Roman boundary - "finis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinxtbach notamermaid

Continued from my post #568. Let us now walk out of Cologne. The road takes us from the Capitol through the city and we take a left fork, not straight to Aachen but the more southern gate, leave the bustling streets behind and get onto the road to Zülpich. Called Tolbiacum in Roman times, this place was the site of a famous battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zülpich Special about Zülpich today is the Museum of Bathing Culture with the old Roman baths as the centrepiece: https://www.roemerthermen-zuelpich.de/de/fuer_kinder_/english/english.html I mentioned that the road was dead straight - and partly it still is (while some of it is not suitable for road traffic, you can walk it, other parts are busy with cars): Notice the kink in Cologne where the road goes through the town gate near Mauritiussteinweg. From Zülpich the road takes you through more stations and posts. This was a main road connecting two cities, so while the Eifel was not densely populated it was nevertheless no wilderness and saw quite a bit of through traffic. There was even small industry like pottery and mining. By the way, the milestones along the way were actually league stones. The Romans adopted the Celtic measure for distances. Anyway, much further along the way, the road is in a swampy area and crosses or runs along a brook called Oosbach outside a village called Duppach. And that is were many decades ago, Roman finds appeared. Professional excavation showed quite a bit of activity in the area and a dedicated club of enthusiasts is looking after the Roman heritage. This year professional archaeologists have been at the site again. The site has revealed something spectacular. A Roman bridge crossing a swamp, i.e. stagnant water rather than a river. This latest round of excavations saw the archaeologists trying to retrieve all wooden supports of the bridge, which are in very good condition due to the fact that they have been waterlogged for 2000 years. This is the news article with video: https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/grabungen-duppach-100.html What also makes this place so special is the fact that dendrochronology has shown that the bridge was most likely built in 53 BC, Julius Caesar's time. If correct, this makes it the second oldest Roman bridge in Germany, and the oldest one that can be clearly attributed to a spot in the landscape. The oldest was a bridge crossing the Rhine, the exact position of where it stood is not known (and it was a very temporary construction). Latest news is that the excavations this year have been successful and the site closed. But you can go to the information panel. In river cruising terms, this village is far away from any port, so unlikely to ever make it into an excursion. It is a full hour from Cochem. From Duppach the road further crosses the Volcanic Eifel region and hits the river Moselle at what is now Trier-West and then crosses the river on the famous Roman bridge which with Medieval alterations still stands and carries modern road traffic. notamermaid

It is September, time to have a look at what the river did at Dresden gauge in August: Ups and downs with the rain. A somewhat unreliable month but the river levels could have been even lower. What at the end of the month lead to (very short) mild flooding in the Upper Rhine valley and caused disruption on the Danube for about four days did not even bring the level at Dresden back up to the mean. Have the Czech authorities really let the rain through the locks and reservoir one on one? Still, September has started at a satisfactory level. How that works out for the river cruises coming up we cannot know at this point. The weather having changed to dryer conditions I am a little skeptical about good conditions for sailing throughout the month. notamermaid

That is a very good question. I have never thought about inquiring about that one for the Elbe. Just mentioning this for all: there is the Elbe Princesse and the Elbe Princesse II. Those are the modern paddle wheelers. CroisiEurope also uses two older small ships on Elbe called MS Mona Lisa and MS Victor Hugo. Both sail from Berlin onto the Elbe but then tend to do the itineraries heading North and West. notamermaid

We all know how busy the rivers are again and how popular river cruising is. But all is not at its best yet according to IG River Cruise. This is the article from the international pages of fvw which is a behind the paywall: https://www.fvw.de/international/data-analysis/study-by-ig-river-cruises-river-cruises-still-need-longer-to-recover-236656 If you are interested you can subscribe. I cannot find another English version, so here is the German article as published on binnenschifffahrt-online.de https://binnenschifffahrt-online.de/2023/08/featured/30743/flusskreuzfahrt/ There are still not nearly as many passengers on river cruise ships as there were 2019. notamermaid

I find it a far superior itinerary of CroisiEurope to the one of Viking. As a side note, I have read that the paddle wheeler technology used on the Elbe Princesse is a bit noisy. But perhaps that is just a perception of a few people. Know anything about this? And a ship spotter has been there: https://www.binnenschifferforum.de/showthread.php?67785-Viking-Beyla-KFGS-07002022&p=462147#post462147 notamermaid

It is September, time to have a look at what the river did at Pfelling gauge: To keep it short: this could have been a satisfactory month if the rain had come a bit earlier than it did and then not in such high volumes. The level has quickly returned to good figures for sailing. If the situation now (407cm) is backed up by a bit of rain this would give us peace of mind for quite a few days indeed. For now I would say this coming week could be smooth sailing. But this is Pfelling, not Kaub, so never a forecast more than three days into the future. notamermaid

It is September, time to have a look at what the river did in August at Kaub gauge: A good month overall for river traffic. Certainly without problems for river cruise ships. We see a dip in the fourth week but that will have only concerned commercial traffic. And then - the big rain. While this caused a problem on the German and to a small extent on the Austrian Danube we saw no problems on the Rhine. The Upper Rhine valley went to mild flooding which did not extent in such a way that it would cause more than minor adjustments to itineraries, if any. No ban on river traffic there. At Kaub we a saw that wave on 31 August but it was not high enough to give us any worries. In fact, it means that September has started on a high, but good level with plenty of water to take us well into the month. The new forecast has changed so that levels of less than 200cm are not anticipated before Tuesday lunchtime. notamermaid

Yes, like T&C's but the difference is that they put this in the catalogue as a "what you need to know" right in the info service pages at the front and not in the small print at the end of the catalogue. This itinerary is much longer than Viking's on a ship. I wonder if the situation is a different one when a third part is involved, i.e. would the charter make a difference to hotels or the cancellation versus coach trip option? May depend on whether it is full charter or part charter perhaps? Would Noble Caledonia be able to provide some insight? notamermaid

AnhaltER1960 mentioned in July that the low water even affected CroisiEurope . The company has very much adapted their itineraries so that the low water normally is not a problem. The ships Elbe Princesse (sailing the itinerary you have posted the map of) and Elbe Princesse II are already well equipped for sailing in low water anyway. But July this year was apparently too bad. Flooding would of course be the other version of nature being unfavourable to your plans. As I am not allowed to link to the German agent of CroisiEurope, here is the info printed in the German catalogue. It says that they may need to make changes to an itinerary at short notice. They may put you on a different ship. They may need to put you up in a hotel. They may do parts of your itinerary by coach. I cannot figure out how to take a screenshot in that catalogue format where you can read like in a paper brochure and cannot see the equivalent info in the English online catalogue. I expect in rare cases they may need to cancel a cruise. Perhaps sending an e-mail to the American agent may yield a bit more info than I can give? Or hopefully someone who has sailed your itinerary will provide an answer. notamermaid

That needs clarifying I think. Sorry. I meant anywhere on the Danube in Germany. But Austria is much better now as well. Dürnstein: Taken from the website https://www.doris.bmk.gv.at/en/fairway-information/water-levels notamermaid

For anyone on a river cruise or land trip. European Heritage Days are again shining a spotlight on our monuments, treasured places. Main open days are in September. This is the page for Germany (address for the German page in link if you wish to have a look): https://www.europeanheritagedays.com/country/Germany notamermaid

Quick tip for tonight, should you happen to be in Koblenz. Night of Museums, long opening hours well into the evening. These are the places taking part: https://www.museumsnacht-koblenz.de/beteiligte-haeuser Coming up next weekend: Tag des offenen Denkmals. That is part of the European heritage days. On the Sunday (and to a small part also the Saturday) many protected monuments and places are open to the public that are usually closed or have very restricted opening times. Have had a look at the offers in my area, spoilt for choice! notamermaid

Passau gauge still going down, albeit more slowly. All good, no more flooding levels on the map anywhere. Passau at 594cm which gives headroom under that bridge. Pfelling gauge at 465cm which should give river cruise ships plenty of water for a few days. A quick recap of August coming soon. notamermaid

Budapest gauge: notamermaid

Perhaps a bit of geography is of interest. We get most of our weather from the West, so rain gets in from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. With only slight shifts in the clouds and where they decide to "throw down the ballast" either the Rhine or Danube basin gets more of the rain. This can be coming more from the Southwestern direction as well, then it comes more through Switzerland. Here is the map (green dots are river level gauges): You can see that the Rhine and Danube are very close together. Reutlingen and Stuttgart are on the Neckar which drains into the Rhine. Shift the clouds even further East with precipitation starting way past Zurich, then you get the rain feeding the alpine Rhine only and the Southern tributaries of the Danube providing the volume of water that drives the flooding along the Danube if the rain is prolonged and heavy. notamermaid

Yes, that was bad. August is a highly unusual time of year for extensive flooding but we get it. The August 2002 floods hit a lot of places and it appears the weather pattern was such that the Danube was massively affected as well. This one this year does not even come close to 2002. That year at Passau has only been beaten by the record flood of June 2013. The statistics of extreme flooding for Passau: On the Rhine, neither 2002 nor 2013 feature in the top ten of floods. notamermaid

As steamboats has said, the wave has gone through Passau. The level is still very high - 670cm - but the situation is improving. The graph: Note that the lock and dam at Kachlet may influence the level at Passau . There is still a lot of water to come, i.e. Hofkirchen and Vilshofen also remain high. But the high volume of water from the Isar river is through. notamermaid