Passau, Germany

July 21^st, 2025

When I looked out of our cabin this morning I thought I was looking at a mirror. I was looking straight at our cabin.

All very weird. Then I remembered from our Rhine cruise that sometimes the boats have to tie up alongside if there isn’t room for them to tie up on the dock.

Not what I had been expecting at all. I hurriedly closed the curtains.

We went up onto the sundeck to see where we were. It was sort of like being in an inside cabin.

We were in Passau, and it looked lovely.

After breakfast we headed out on our walking tour.

The streets are narrow, but I love the concept of following the painted brick road.

There are arches on may of the streets to prevent the houses falling over. Scary.

The street we were on had many art studios

Passau is prone to flooding because the river is very narrow. There are several markers there depicting the high water levels in the past. The most recent flood was on June 3^rd, 2013. The people here seem resigned to their fate with the risks from the river. Apparently it would be impossible to sell your house in the flood area, so they just rebuild and the houses get passed down from one family member to another.

There are several beautiful churches in Passau.

This is St Michaels

And this is St Stephan’s Cathedral

Seeing the interior of these buildings made me think how much nicer the interiors of the Baroque churches are than the Gothic ones. Gothic churches often seem so dark and dreary inside, whilst Baroque ones, although usually a bit over the top when it comes to decorations, are usually lovely and bright.

Passau is a lovely city, we really enjoyed walking around.

At the end of the tour we went to the City Hall

And stopped at a nearby Beer Garden.

We just had to have beer and pretzels

Then it was time to visit the Glass Museum in the nearby hotel.

There are over 15,000 glass objects on display, and I think we must have seen them all.

It was all rather strange.

It looked like it was going to rain so we decided to go back to the boat for lunch.

When we arrived at the dock, our boat was no longer there. Ah, there it is in the middle of the river.

We had had to move to let the boat docked next to us go on its merry way, so we were now waiting for our boat to return to the dock.

It was starting to rain, so we hoped this would happen soon.

There were no problems getting the boat tied up to the dock, but then lowering the gangway seemed to be a challenge, so we stood in the rain for 45 minutes until they could work out what to do.

Finally they worked it out, and we were able to get back on board. The issue was that by then lunch was over and we didn’t feel much like going ashore in the rain to find a restaurant.

The Kane told us that even though the kitchen was closed, they would make lunch for us. I was expecting something like a cheese sandwich, but we had soup, fish and chips, and fruit salad and ice cream.

I must say that so far the staff have really gone out of their way to do things for us. Nothing is too much to ask. It really has been most impressive.

Because we will be in Austria tomorrow, we had a special Austrian themed dinner. We decided to eat dinner in the Aquavit Terrace at the front of the ship so we could watch us sail away.

Passau is at the confluence of 3 rivers; the Inn, the Ilz and the Danube. The 3 rivers are different colors -green, black and blue (well not so much). Our guide had advised us to watch as we went through the Dreiflusseek – where the 3 rivers meet.

We had tried to eat at the Aquavit restaurant before but had been told that there were no tables for 6. Tonight we decided that this was nonsense and 6 of us squeezed around a table for 4, much to the annoyance of our waitress.

This actually turned out to be a mistake as there were several platters of food  and large pretzels as part of the Austrian dinner, and there really wasn’t enough room on the table for everything.

Reluctantly our waitress allowed us to put 2 tables together. Problem solved.

We had hoped to watch the sail away as we dined, but we were not moving. Finally the captain let us know that we couldn’t leave until the captain of the ship next to us, came back to his ship, so we were simply stuck there. Again, I don’t know if he was joking, but the fact was they were not moving, and nor were we.

Meanwhile we enjoyed our Austrian dinner (even though we are in Germany).

Finally we got going, and we had a lovely view from our table.

Although the weather looked rather nasty outside

I never really saw the colors of the confluence.

The weather improved somewhat, and we could finally sit back and eat, and enjoy the beautiful scenery we were passing.

I am a great fan of dinner cruises, but usually the cruise is great, and the food is bad, Not so tonight. The view was great, the food was delicious, and there were amazing pastries. What more could you ask for?

Ah, a lock or two would be appreciated.

The river didn’t disappoint.

We shared the first lock with another riverboat.

But we had the second one all to ourselves

It was time for dessert

And more peaceful sailing down the river

After dinner there was a movie trivia quiz. Brian and I didn’t join in as we had work to catch up with, but the others did, and apparently they did quite well. I knew they would!