Wine. Did I say "wine"? Yep. Wine. Lots of it.

So... we just got back from our anniversary trip. Wife heard a while back that Marriott has a property that's an actual castle, so of course we just had to stay there. In retrospect, the whole "anniversary in a castle" thing might not have been as much of an unplanned coincidence as I originally thought.

We may have uncovered a serious problem. Turns out my wife now identifies as royalty, and has been insisting on referring to herself in the third person. That (by itself) is bad enough, but having to bow to her every time I enter or leave the room she's in has just gotten tiresome.

I picked her up from work on Wednesday afternoon, and we headed out west. The castle is located in the Mosel Valley, named after the Mosel River. The Mosel river flows through France and Luxembourg before emptying into the Rhine River in Koblenz, a city about 50 miles (as the crow flies) from Frankfurt.

Geology nerd stuff incoming - skip the next paragraph if you're not into it:

Over the eons, tectonic plate movement caused the Rhenish Slate Mountains to rise between the Eifel and Hunsrück Mountain ranges. The Mosel river wound between those ranges, wearing down the softer limestone and creating the Mosel Valley, leaving the relatively hard and dense slate scattered on top of the ground. The erosion of the limestone created very steep inclines (allowing for extended periods of exposure to the sun), while the cracked slate covering the ground acts as a heat sink, combining to make one of the most fertile areas in the world for growing grapes. There are records of ancient Romans making wine in the region as far back as the second century, as the cost for transporting wine from Italy up to the region was exorbitant.

Because of the geography of the valley, these vineyards are considered the steepest vineyards in the world, with up to 65 degrees on inclination. With the vineyards being that steep, all of the tending of the vines has to be manual, and the vintners use trolleys running on a single rail to move supplies and workers up and down the slopes. I thought those were pretty cool, so I made the family photographer take extra pics of those.

The castle was built in the 1880's for a German industrialist and winery owner. It's currently a 49 room hotel affiliated with the Marriott hotel chain. I can't tell when it was purchased - I suppose that doesn't really matter in the whole scheme of things.

We unloaded our suitcases into the room and noticed that the hotel had put a small bottle of wine in our room for us. (Bottle count: ½ bottle)

walked around the little town, finding a local eatery for a quick dinner.

Returning to the hotel, we stopped at the reception desk to take advantage of a previously offered complementary glass of wine, which we enjoyed in the library. I guess royalty does have its privileges!

Thursday we woke up and had breakfast, then took off to explore the nearby area. We ended up in Bitburg.

Bitburg was founded about 2000 years ago as a stopping point on the journey from Lyon to Cologne. As we learned during our tour of Cologne, the cathedral in Cologne has been a well known destination for catholic pilgrims for much of its history. Lyon, at the time, was one of the largest Roman cities west of Italy, and a major city for banking and commerce - it remains the second largest city in France (after Paris, of course). 

Feels like I might be getting a little into the weeds with the history, and we're only in the second day of the trip! Moving on...

One of the major attractions of Bitburg is the brewery, the third most popular in Germany. We found out that there would be a tour later in the afternoon, so we bought tickets and headed out to explore the town for a while.

Walking toward the pedestrian area, we passed by a second hand store, so of course Her Royal Highness had to go in. Luckily, she didn't find anything she couldn't live without... my luck wouldn't hold for the whole weekend, though (spoiler alert).

It started raining as we left the store, so we stopped at a cafe for some cappuccinos to try to wait it out. We wandered a bit more, and had a quick lunch at a local restaurant. Once we finished eating, we headed back to the brewery in time for our tour.

We took the brewery tour, our first one in Germany! We've done multiple tours in other countries in the past, so we didn't learn anything new, but each had a beer and pretzel afterward.

We got back to the hotel in time for our wine tasting; in addition to a winery that's affiliated with the hotel itself, the hotel allows different wineries to use their wine cellar to host tastings as well. We had signed up when we arrived, and met the owner of the company, along with the other guests. 

The wine tasting was given by the founder of the winery, who had just purchased the land for his winery a couple of years ago. His grandmother had taught him about the wine business, so he named the winery after her. We sampled six different types of Rieslings, and ended up purchasing 6 bottles.

(Bottle count: 6 ½)

The food offered at the tasting was just about the right amount for my dinner, but the wife would need to eat some more, so we loaded into the car and drove to the next town over and bought some supplies at the nearest grocery store. Instead of heading straight back to the hotel, we decided to go ahead and fill the car up, since we'd be needing gas sometime the next day.

The hotel was right on the river, but to get to the gas station, we had to drive back out of the valley and over the mountains. The road climbing out of the valley was spectacular, winding straight up the mountain, through vineyards, with myriad switchbacks. We stopped several times to take pictures:

We eventually got to the gas station, and while filling up the car, I saw a vending machine that appeared to have items which had been lost in the mail; it was one of those circular ones, where you select which level you want, then open the sliding door. All of the packages looked like Amazon packages with the mailing labels torn off. All of the items were €10 each, so we just had to get one of them. I chose a promising looking one, and ended up with 2 phone cases for random phones (that we don't own), and an off-brand smart watch. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, eh?

We stopped on the way back to take a few more pictures, and I went down to the pool when we got back.

Friday morning started with Breakfast, followed by wandering through the neighboring towns.

The next town down the river is called Bernkastel-Kues; we wandered around there taking pictures.

We ended up going to Trier after leaving there.

Founded by the Romans in the 1st century BC, Trier is considered Germany's oldest city. We had a quick bite to eat, and toured a couple of churches:

First up was the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). Constantine the Great commissioned the first church on this site in 326AD. The church had become dilapidated by around 1200, so construction began on the current building in around 1230, finishing around 1260. Part of the roof was destroyed in WWII, but other than that (and minor repairs), the church has stayed mostly the same since then.

Next was the Trier Cathedral. Considered the oldest cathedral in Germany, it was originally commissioned around the year 270. The current building was constructed between 1235 and 1270. 

One of the significant things about this particular church is that it (supposedly) contains the "seamless robe" of Jesus. According to one story, Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great discovered the robe in either 327 or 328 in the Holy Land, and bequeathed it to the city of Trier, where Constantine had lived for some years before becoming emperor. That's one story.

There are a couple of other stories relating to the robe though; one of them places it in a church in the outskirts of Paris, while yet another places pieces of it throughout several churches in Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

We saw the display case for the robe; it was inside a dedicated room at the end of the church. From our vantage point, you could see the case, but nothing that was in it.

Afterwards, we wandered around the city for a little while, and the boss ended up touring through something called "Porta Nigra" (Latin for "Black Gate"). For unknown reasons, the gate was never finished, but that didn't stop the Romans from using it as one of the four main gates to the city for centuries - until the end of the Roman era. The name dates back to the middle ages - no record remains of the name of the building during Roman times - but even back in the middle ages, the gate was known for its dark colored stones.

During our exploration, we bought another bottle of wine (bottle count: 7 ½).

After our wandering, we headed back to the hotel for another wine tasting. This one was at the winery that's associated with the hotel. We enjoyed our tasting, purchased a glass each, and sat out in the courtyard, drinking and waiting for a rainstorm to pass. Once it had passed, we went back into the store, retrieved our purchased bottles of wine, and headed up to the room to drop them off. (Bottle count:11 ½)

We headed back out and had dinner at an Italian restaurant in town; pretty good food.

I went back to the pool when we got back to the room, while Her Royal Highness went climbing. She walked to the end of town, and climbed up to the top of one of the hills to take pictures of the sunset.

We ate breakfast the next morning, packed up, and left the hotel, but instead of driving straight back, wanted to follow the river for a while, stopping at whatever different towns caught our eyes.

First major stop was a little town called Traben-Trarbach, simply because it had a cool looking bridge that I wanted to walk over. We parked under one end of the bridge and walked across, exploring the town on the other side. We stopped for a light snack and a glass of wine, then continued exploring. Unfortunately, there were a lot of antique stores; luckily, the boss didn't buy anything - she did see one closed store that had prices marked on everything, and made me promise that we'd come back, as they had a bunch of Westerwald pieces with decent prices. We continued wandering, walking back across the bridge and exploring the town on the other side of the river. We bought a couple of bottles of wine there too. (Bottle count:13 ½)

At some little town, we encountered a flea market, so of course, we stopped. Wife ended up getting a couple of pieces of pottery at the flea market; one was €3 and one was €13. When she was washing them at home, the handle broke on the €3 pitcher. I glued it back on, but she was able to see for a fact that it wasn't Westerwald, so she didn't feel too bad about it.

We stopped a little later on at a little town called Valwig, simply because we saw a vending machine on the side of the road that sold wine. In taking pictures of it, the logo on the machine was the same as the logo at the store next to it... turns out, the store was the manufacturer of different kinds of liqueur; we got a couple of bottles before we hit the road. (Bottle count: 13 ½ bottles of wine + 2 bottles of liqueur and a sampler box)

We finally made it to Cochem, our main destination on the way home. Unfortunately, there was some sort of festival going on, and we weren't able to find parking anywhere near the town. We decided to come back another time, as it's only a couple of hours from the house. Really cute town, though!

Our final bottle count for the trip was:

• 13 ½ random bottles of Riesling
• 1 bottle of black cherry liqueur
• 1 bottle of strawberry liqueur
• 1 sampler box of random flavored liqueurs 

That's it for now, we've got a little trip planned next week, so stay tuned!