Mission Moselle/Mosel Accomplished

Winnigen, 25 km away from Moselkern would be our last stop before Koblenz.

More castles guarded this route, near and far. One unusual sight we encountered on this stage was a former palace called Schloss von der Leyen, that we actually cycled right through. It is the only waterside castle on the Mosel, the home of the von der Leyan family who provided a number of 18th C prince-archbishops of Trier. It's a lovely structure but one can image the prince-archbishops not being very happy with the fact that the road and railway now run right through this palace. Hardly defensible! Whose great modern idea was that?

Yet another big turn of the river brought us to Winnegan, another sweet little wine town. Just before town, the landscape featured another modern contribution to the landscape, a Moseltalbrücke, a slender but towering motorway bridge that spans the entire gorge.

Winnigan's old town streets have archways of grape vines and the grape motif is everywhere, including beautiful flag holders with golden grape bunches attached to buildings. It hosts Germany's longest running wine festival in August and there were still lots of tractors rumbling up and down the streets on their way to or from the vineyards.

It also has the regrettable distinction of being regarded as a centre for witchcraft in the 17th C and sentencing 21 people to death between 1630 and 1661 for being witches and wizards. The fountain in the main square features a woman on a broom.

It's now a very pretty small village with quite a few eating options. We were again looking for a change from German food so were happy to find a little Italian restaurant that seemed very popular with the locals and had a good feed of pasta.

As we headed off the next day, it was hard to grasp that after all those cycle kilometres - 820 to be exact - and all the intoxicatingly beautiful landscapes we had been through that we would finally be saying farewell to our constant companion these past 4 weeks, the Moselle/Mosel River. We greeted it at its source, a mere trickle from an underground spring, at the Col de Bussang in the Vosges Mountains of France, followed it through the Alsace into Luxembourg and then into Germany in the Hunsbrük Mountains and would now see it merge with the mighty Rhine in Koblenz, Germany. The dreamy, misty, languid Mosel would be no more.

It wasn't a long ride from Winnigen before we reached the outskirts of Koblenz and passed under several of the bridges spanning the Mosel as it moves towards its rendezvous with the Rhine.

Soon we could see the huge Ehrenbreitstein fortress on the hill across from the city on the east bank of the Rhine, with its gondola cablecars going back and forth across the Rhine, located strategically at the point where the two rivers meet. And almost too suddenly we had arrived - in a huge triangular square projecting out into the confluence, Deutsches Eck (German Corner) and dominated by the overwhelmingly massive bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, the world's largest equestrian monument. Also impressive were giant-sized elaborate stone bollards for boats along the water. Koblenz, from the Latin "confluentes" (at the merging of rivers) - we made it!