First day of Sailing

March 24

I wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep for over two hours. Maybe my body is preparing for tonight and getting up to watch the game. We sleep in and miss breakfast and the cruise overview. The ship cruises to Passau. Goodbye Vilshofen, I hardly knew you.

Barge with a car parked on top. That's not something I see everyday.

Church of St. Paul (?) as we pull into Passau.

We leave the ship and head towards the fortress Veste Oberhaus. This wall shows the flood heights including the most recent one in 2013. It's the second highest.

In the square there is wedding party. Sunny but a little chilly.

The fortress was finished in 1499. If you look closely the 4 is half and 8. Basically cut off the bottom third. If you then take that and rotate it counterclockwise, it looks somewhat like todays 4. Also if you cut that in half top to bottom and look at the right half, you get a two.

It's a relatively easy walk up to the caste and you get good views of the city. You can see the bridge we walked across.

Afterwards we come back to town and see St. Stephan's Cathedral. It has largest organ outside the United States.

 For some reason I like pulpits.

 It also has this tiny organ.

If you look closely, I have the statue a halo with the clock on the St. Stephans.

As we wander back, I decide to get a better picture of St. Paul.

 And pass a busy cafe. I'm tempted to stop by but we have a wine tasting.

L'Ecole starts out the trip with their award winning wines. I'm a Perigee lover. 

Afterwards, there is time before dinner so I try to figure out what our game watching options are. Wi-Fi is about dialup speeds for those who remember that. So streaming the game over Wi-Fi is not an option. I try to plug in my router directly to the Ethernet. This seems to work and open signal is showing reasonable speeds. I VPN into my house but I can't get the DirecTV app to connect. Ugh. I go to the NCAA webpage on the room computer but I can't sign in with my DirecTV credentials. It won't even bring up the login page. I try my comcast account since I have that for internet at home. That works. It's too early to stream the first game so I don't know if this will work or not. Off to dinner. 

Salad with endive, radicchio, arugula, walnuts and blue cheese.

Beef consommé with dumplings. The dumplings and soup are mild.

The paso buco is super tender but the potatoes are gluey. The vegetables are overcooked.

 The chocolate cake is spongy and fairly bland. It's good vanilla ice cream but it also just ice cream.

Some Sound of Music music in the lounge after dinner. I go to sleep and set the alarm for 1:49 am which is tip-off.