August 5 - Passau, Germany

We arrived in Passau at about 7:00 am.  This is another old city where 3 rivers meet; the Danube, the Inns, and the Ilz. It was the one port where Dawn was concerned about the water level because she could remember from a few years ago, watching pictures on the news of Passau being seriously flooded. We had been told that if the water is too high, we won't be able to get under some of the bridges, so would have to move from place to place on buses. As it was, that didn't happen.

Today, there was an optional tour to Salzburg which we were not going on. We had been there when we were here for the Finland hockey tournament, and the tour was the same as we had gone on. Instead, we went on a brief walking tour of the old town and visited some of the sites in the city.

The church was one of the highlights of this tour. It has an organ with over 1700 pipes, and each day at 12:00 noon, there is a half hour concert. We wanted to go to it, so made sure to purchase tickets for this concert. Then, there was a more than an hours wait until the concert started. It was drizzling on and off, so wasn't the most pleasant of times, but we were able to get into some stores (of course) to purchase some souvenirs.

With about an hour to go, we finally went back to the church and sat on some benches that were under cover, to wait until the doors opened. We watched more and more people coming to purchase tickets, and it looked like there was going to be a big crowd.

When the doors opened, we finally got in and grabbed a couple of chairs, rather than sit in the hard, uncomfortable-looking pews. Before the concert started, it seemed that the place was full. Someone said at one point that they thought there were 400 people there for the concert, and that sounded about right.

When it started, we sat and listened for the half hour. It was pretty amazing to hear the high and the low sounds that could be created. There were 5 different places where the pipes were located in the church, and the pieces that were played highlighted the various pipe sections. It was like stereo sound, hearing where the sounds came from.

After that, it was back to the ship to laze around for the rest of the day. As I said, we were tired, and it felt good to not have something on the agenda. During the wait, there was an announcement over the PA system that they were going to move the ship for a couple hours because they needed a diver to go down and make some repairs to the thrusters. We sat in the lounge at the front, and watched as they moved the ship, and then moored at another industrial dock to wait for the diver to arrive.

Finally he showed up, got into his wet suit and went in the water. Later he came back up and got a torch to cut something. Then, his helper pulled up some grating, which I at first thought was stuck in the thruster prop, but turned out to be the cover of the thruster. After this, they started pulling something up, which turned out to be a very long piece of mooring rope that had been caught in the thruster propeller.

We were moored here much longer than anticipated, so the ship taxied the people who had stayed on shore back to this moorage area. When everyone was aboard, we left for our final port, Regensburg.