.: day-trip: limburg-an-der-lahn und koblenz :.

We had a chance to spend the day further exploring the Rhine region and first visited Limburg-an-der-Lahn. Despite the negative publicity of late for the city and the diocese with the controversy of the former bishop, the so-called bishop of bling because of his extravagant misuse of Church funds to support a lavish lifestyle and cost overruns on his residence (now a museum for the cathedral's treasures but there were threats to turn it into a soup kitchen or housing for refugees—ideas I like better) before being dismissed by the Pope for too much conspicuous consumption and for being rather disconnected from his parishioners.
Of course, the city had many timeless landmarks to marvel at besides—and some in fact tried to excuse the former church figure's behavior as wanting to create a monument that would survive the ages, just like the Dom and castle on the Lahn river it faces. We took a tour around the cathedral and the town's old half-timbered houses, attesting to an important history in trade and manufacture—the settlement having developed in the only gorge among the Rhenish mountain ranges that come together in the valley of the Lahn. A nice sunny day was materializing and we went westward to see the city of Koblenz next.
By accident, as we approached, we made a detour to something advertised as Fortress Ehrenbreitstein and we were really glad we had made that turn, rather than try to engage the city directly. A little bus brought us uphill to the massive grounds of the fortified installation, commissioned by the Prussian princes in the early 1800s to protect the strategically important town below from the armies of the Napoleon, and as one of the largest military complexes in the world, it is considered to be The Guard on the Rhine from the song “Die Wacht am Rhein.”
The fortress was impervious to attacks but switched control many times over its relatively short history and hosts a number of memorials, museum exhibitions and a youth hostel in its maze of turrets and walls.
We had a commanding view of Koblenz below, punctuated by the colossal statue of Emperor Wilhelm I a-gee (mounted on a horse) and completed about a century latter on a wedge of land known as the Deutsches Eck. In another strategically important convergence, at this point the Moselle joins the Rhine, and from the fortress, we were able to take a ride down to the city in a gondola and do some more exploring.
 Usually, time was a little more of a commodity since the park was usually only in operation until six in the evening, but with the World Cup and a public-viewing being held in the fortress grounds later, the lift was in operation until midnight. There were many other interesting structures to see and we even had a bit of Mediterranean flair along the banks of the Moselle.