Rhine River - Day 7 - Mainz and Heidelberg

Wednesday, Dec 14th, started out at Mainz Germany.  It's a beautiful small town of about 200,000 people.  As with other Rhine River cities it has a lot of art work spread through out the town.

One of the main attractions of Mainz is the Gutenberg Museum.  Unfortunately they don't allow any picture taking so I have nothing to show for that.  However, Johannes Gutenberg was incredibly important in that he developed a printing press that started allowing the mass production of books which further enabled the masses of humanity to start learning through reading.  Before this invention people generally relied on religious leaders to provide them information which tended to be fairly negative and threatening. Gutenberg's invention allowed them to read the bible on their own.  The Catholic church actually censored Gutenberg's books from fear of losing control of the masses, which indeed did start to happen.  Gutenberg published 300 large 2 volume bibles in the mid 15th century of which 53 still remain.  The museum has one full set and then an extra first volume.  Each volume is estimated to be worth $50 million.

We then continued on to the local cathedral.

These cast iron doors were poured in the 13the century.  Each door weighs in excess of a ton.  I have no idea how one would open that.

In the afternoon we drove out to Heidelberg which is on the Neckar river.  These rivers still flood every decade or so and a bad flood in 1995 completely covered this old bridge from the 17th century.

We toured the Heidelberg Castle which was trashed by the French back in the 19th century and remains largely non-restored since the original paper work on the architectural design were lost in a fire.  Germany has passed a law that historical buildings cannot be rebuilt unless they are redone to the original design.  Since nobody can determine the original design, this castle remains largely unfinished.

Looking down on the city of Heidelberg.

Inside the castle courtyard.

This huge barrel was built to hold wine which was used as a form of taxes for the castle.  Unfortunately nobody anticipated the weight of this much wine in a large barrel and it always leaked and ended up not being used at all.

Until later, keep drinking the wine before it spills out of the barrel.