Last week I told you about visiting Koblenz and the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument. After our stop there, we boarded buses to head to Braubach for a guided tour of Marksburg Castle.
This was part of our Viking River Cruise last April. For some of the excursions we took tour buses, which are part of the Viking Fleet as well. For each cruise, they have buses that travel the same route on land as the ship and they meet us on the days when we travel off the banks of the Rhine to visit other destinations, like today, when we visited the castle. And this castle tour was optional, there were parts where a lot of steps or steep inclines were involved, and for those that chose not to participate, they stayed on board our ship and headed down the Rhine to where the buses would take us to meet up with them later in the day.
And as you can see above, this castle sits atop a hill. And we were told the road to the top was narrow (one lane) but not to worry, there were spots for buses to pull over should they encounter other buses so that they could pass each other without having to back all the way back down and start over again. And, we were also told the buses could only go so far, which is why there was a steep incline involved and lots of steps to get to the castle.
Going up we had no problems. And don’t worry, I will show you some pictures and tell you about our tour of the castle in another post. It was coming down where we experienced the passing bus rule.
Here you can see our line of buses heading down the narrow road. And there is a blue bus over to the right in the passing space. You see the rule is, buses coming down have the right of way, so if you are coming up and you run into buses coming down, you have to back down to the next available passing space and park there, letting the buses coming down pass.
Which makes sense. The buses would have a hard time backing up the hill. You can see how narrow the road is. And let me tell you, our bus drivers were pros. They made it look so easy.
You can see one of our buses got around this one, the next one was in line to pass and then us. Again, the road is extremely narrow and it is amazing how these drivers maneuvered these large buses around.
Here is a better shot of the buses passing each other. And do you see what is behind the bus?
Do you see the car? Well evidently the car was not aware of the passing rules, as you will see coming up.
Here is our bus passing the up coming bus. See how close we are? Boy those drivers are good.
Uh oh. Remember the car I told you about? Well it turned out it was two cars, driven by tourists that did not know about the passing rule. Instead of backing down, they pulled over to the right, thinking they would make the buses go by them.
See what I mean? There is not room for passing anything on this road unless you pull off in one of the passing spaces. Soon we are at a stop.
And then our Viking guide gets off our bus and heads down to join the others. They are the ones in the red coats. And each bus has a Viking representative on board at all times which is nice. It’s not like they put you on a bus and just leave you to your own. They are there on the tour with you to assist in any way, just like this.
It turned out that one of the tourists, trying to go around the bus, hit the bus. So we had to wait while they got the insurance and contact information exchanged. And our guides explained to them the passing rule. So the cars had to back down the hill and let us pass, which they should have done to begin with. Our buses were much bigger anyway.
And now we had a story to tell that not everyone else would. We got to see the passing rule in action and we got to see exactly why it was there to begin with. Oh, no Viking buses or passengers were harmed in this event. Unfortunately there was damage to the car, some slight cosmetic damage to the bus and possibly a bit of bruised pride on the part of the tourist that hit the bus. Thank you to Viking for a safe trip to Marksburg Castle!
This is not a sponsored post. This is my experience from my trip with Viking River Cruises. Email me to find out how you can save $100 when you book your first cruise with Viking through their referral program.
Leave a Reply