Sunday Afternoon Jaunt

One of the first poems Jack studied this year is "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. We came to the following stanza:

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse Tower on the Rhine.

We had to look up this reference because we live close to Bingen and well, a Mouse Tower just sounds interesting. After reading about it, we knew we wanted to go see it for ourselves. Imagine our surprise to discover that it is only a few hundred yards away from the museum where we learned about St. Hildegard of Bingen last year! The weather was cold and windy and we could not access the castle or the tower from where we were. We will have to revisit this site again when the weather is more agreeable.

We actually started our day in Mainz, which is about 25 minutes away from Bingen. We went to the Gutenberg Museum. We paid the entrance fee, and the clerk told us that there was a live demonstration of the printing press in thirty minutes. It was in German, but we could still watch. So we hung up our coats, visited the WC, and headed to the demonstration area to look around while we waited. A group came down the stairs and a gentleman began the demonstration...in English! So we sat down and watched and listened. After it was over, he told everyone to follow him upstairs for the next part of his tour. Oops! We accidentally sat in on someone's group tour! I took some pictures until I was kindly told that I wasn't supposed to. In my defense, I never saw any sign saying as much.

Then we walked across the plaza to the Cathedral. The children were just wanting to get to the Mouse Tower at this point, so it was a quick walk through the Cathedral! The one thing the kids do in every church we visit is light a candle and offer up a prayer for someone special. That done, they were done, and we left.

We stopped at the bakery to pick up a baguette to go with the ham and cheese I had packed in the car. We ate along the way to Bingen. Minus the frustrations of a broken GPS (we really need to get another one!), and the fact that my phone died while navigating us to Bingen, we had a nice little impromptu field trip yesterday.