We arrived in Nuremberg shortly before noon and disembarked at 1:30 for a driving / walking tour of the town. The day was quite cloudy, a bit breezy, with some fairly hard rain showers in the late afternoon. Then the skies cleared up and sunshine appeared just as we were leaving town to go back to the boat. The day was very pleasant and much less hectic that the previous two days. It was good to have some downtime!

Nina and I were in Nuremberg in October 1999 for a couple of days and did some sightseeing when we were here then. We ended our visit on a Sunday, so it’s quite nearly five years to the day when we were in this town last. Based on the tour, we saw almost everything the first time that we saw today, so we skipped the walking part of the tour. On the way into town we stopped at the Zeppelin Field on the southeast part of the city were the huge airships started and ended their transatlantic flights. It’s pretty hard to imagine an airship flight across the Atlantic, and I’ve been quite curious as to why no one has attempted to do this since then. It would certainly be much safer today than it was in the 1920’s! The National Socialists (the Nazi Party) transformed the Zeppelin Field in the 1930’s into a rally field where hundreds of thousands of Germans would gather to hear Hitler speak. Perhaps some of the most famous large-gathering pictures of Hitler were taken at this place. Today the huge concrete buildings still stand and not much is being done with them. From there we drove to the west side of the city to visit Court 600, where the famous Nuremberg war trials were held from November 1945 through October 1946. The building was closed (being a Sunday) so we stopped long enough to take some pictures outside the building and then proceeded through the center part of the town and up to the castle overlooking the city. That’s where we parted company with the walking tour as we have already been there.

However, almost everything was closed in the city. We did some window-shopping, visited a couple of churches, and had an apple juice in a coffee shop while it was raining. Then we met the bus for the ride back to the boat.

After dinner the cruise staff had booked some German entertainment – a couple of fellows with an accordion and a guitar singing some good old German folk and polka music. It was great fun. The day is now finished and we’re headed for bed.

Tomorrow we’ll be cruising the last part of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal to Bamberg and will arrive about noon. We didn’t think much of Bamberg the last time we were there, so it’ll be interesting to see what we’ll learn from the walking tour.