Discovering Germany by Bike and Barge: My Journey as a Cycling Newbie

i've just disembarked a european river cruise on a 1930s barge that took everything i thought i knew about cruising and turned it on its head our cruise was a week long and on the crew schedule was 225 kilometers of cycling across the german countryside from bond to sarburg i am definitely not a cyclist so i was very nervous i didn't want to let anybody down to say that it was an eventful cruise would be an understatement we had injuries we had a heat wave i smashed my camera and i saw and did things that i never thought would be possible on a cruise before and christina the owners of the merlin invited me to join them on their ship i had no idea that this type of cruise existed my first thought was cycling i can't cycle well technically i can cycle but at this point i hadn't been on a bike for a good five years i had visions of me being the person who was holding everybody else up i didn't know if physically i could cycle that far and what would happen if i couldn't what happened if i got out there and i needed to go back i didn't know i didn't know what it would be like cruising on a barge i didn't know who else would book this type of cruise i really had no idea i've been cruising on ocean cruises and the bigger river cruise ships for years but when talking about barges technically the oxford english dictionary definition is a long flat bottom boat for carrying freight on canals or rivers which doesn't sound particularly luxurious which may explain why i was so surprised when i stepped on board when we arrived we were greeted by christina and our guide leah on the front deck the front deck area here was beautifully decorated and we spent a lot of time here as the cruise went on we chatted a little bit to the other guests and i found out that at least half of the people who were on that cruise had previously taken a cruise on the merlin which i thought was a good sign although the merlin was originally built as a traditional barge in the 1930s i'm happy to say that she was converted to be a passenger barge in the early 2000s i did talk to quite a few people who when i said i was going on a barge they thought i was staying underwater in some sort of industrial bunks maybe with a vending machine in the corner for food and i'm happy to say it was nothing like that the merlin has 12 passenger cabins so a maximum capacity of 24 guests before this the smallest boat that i've ever been on had around 100 guests so it was a big change to go from 100 plus down to this very small ship i didn't know how i would like it each cabin on board is the same and i was really surprised by the size the average size of a river cruise ship cabin is 13.9 meters squared and the merlins come in at a little bit over 11 meter squared which for a barge i think is very impressive it would be easy to forget sometimes that you're on a barge and there were actually a couple of things about this cabin that i massively preferred compared to the river ships and the ocean ships that i've been on in the past after we'd settled in a little bit we went to the main lounge for an introductory talk and a welcome drink with and christina it was around now that i realized just how different this cruise would be from all the cruises i'd done before when you go on a cruise with 5 000 plus passengers you definitely don't sit around in a circle and introduce yourself to the group that would take the full cruise you wouldn't have any time to do anything else we had 19 guests on our cruise and the majority were from the usa we also had a couple of people from canada one dutch couple and us of course from england and christina bought the merlin in 2019 after working on the bigger river cruise ships as captains they sold their house they quit their jobs and they bought this company they live on board with their dog sasha who can often be seen on board and you will see her in this video the welcome talk did put me at ease a little because when we went around everybody said that they were hoping for a route that was flat i hadn't even let myself think about things like hills before this cruise i was just worried about sitting on the sandal all day and if i would be able to keep up with everybody else i knew at this point that a heat wave was heading for europe and the temperatures were expected to be hotter than i'd ever experienced before not cycled in but ever experienced after our welcome talk we headed to the restaurant area of the ship for our first dinner the restaurant always looked beautiful and there would be color coordinated mats and soviets it felt like everybody had really made such an effort with this space nothing was ever scuffed or damaged everything was beautiful i don't know how else to say it look at this christina who is also the host and the second captain was the chef for the entire ship i've got to be honest i didn't have particularly high expectations from the food on a bike and barge cruise i kind of just thought that the food would be fuel for us fuel so that we could cycle every day and because we had such a small group i thought that we would never have any choice about anything i was so unbelievably wrong and i've never been happier to have been wrong on our first night we had a sweet corn soup a beef bourbon and an apple strudel i had a tofu version because i'm a vegetarian and it was incredible one of the best meals i've had on a cruise ever anywhere ever the food definitely was a pleasant surprise and i was hoping at this point that the food would be as good for the rest of the cruise on the schedule was a total of 225 kilometers of cycling i knew that i wouldn't be able to do all of that but i hope that i would be able to get at least 150 for somebody who had never done more than 20 though that was a very ambitious goal our ship was docked in cologne overnight and we went for an explore in the evening our all aboard time was 5 45 am so if you did want to spend the night out partying you definitely could i knew though that we had cycling the next day and that there was 45 kilometers on the schedule pre-crews we were given a schedule like this which said where we would be cycling each day and how long the routes were it included some information about where we were going and a few photos which i thought was really lovely i've never had such a detailed pre-cruise schedule before the schedule was produced in advance so sometimes things did change slightly i missed one of the changes on day two and it could have been an issue but thanks to kuhn and the small group that we had it actually ended up working out quite well in our cabin too there was a binder that had all of the information that we needed it was so helpful for me because on cruises like this i'm always trying to remember everything and being able to see things written down in black and white it was very very useful the binder also contains some important information about the cabin toilets but more about that later in the video breakfast was 8 till 9 as it was most mornings and there was a good choice of breads and pastries and eggs and pancakes and fruit and cereal i'm not really a breakfast person but i knew that on this cruise i would need the energy so i did make an effort to eat breakfast every day on this cruise the merlin was sailing during breakfast and we arrived at a place called bonn at around 10 a.m while we were sailing our guide leah showed us the bikes and explained a little bit about how the bike tours would work she explained that always there would be somebody at the back with a walkie-talkie who could speak to her as she was always at the front and she also explained that if for any point during a tour we needed to take a sharp turn the person behind leah would get off the bike and they would become a signpost to show everybody else where to go i did get to be a signpost at one point during this cruise but that was also the site of one of the worst injuries of the cruise it wasn't my fault when the merlin docked our bikes were taken to land and we adjusted them to suit us pre-crews we had already sent in our leg measurements so that we could be matched to the right frame because on board they have four different frame sizes i don't know much about bikes and i'm not going to pretend that i do but the bikes were a brand called sensor and my bike was so much more comfortable to ride than my bike that i have at home some people do like to bring their own bikes on board and told me that this is okay as long as they do have the space on board during that cruise it was at this point that i attached my camera to my handlebars and that worked very well until it didn't work well rest in peace to my camera we started our first cycle ride and at this point it wasn't too warm we cycled along the river we stopped to eat lunch we refilled our water bottles and then we stopped for ice cream in the afternoon each day as well as cooking us dinner and cooking us breakfast christina would make us a little pat lunch in a bag with our name on it it would usually be a sandwich a carton of juice and some sort of snack we could of course bring more food if we wanted to we could buy more food if we wanted to we had these yellow bags on our bikes so you could put everything in there the yellow bikes were provided to us as well the helmets as were the water bottles you don't need anything other than yourself our journey took us around five hours and we traveled 45 kilometers in that time of course we stopped to have a look at things we stopped to have lunch but that was double any cycle ride i'd ever done before in my life i definitely was still getting used to cycling my balance my coordination was not fantastic but it was not as difficult as i thought it would be i guess because we kept stopping and having a look at things it kind of gave you legs and more importantly it gave your bum a little bit of a break i knew that on the schedule for the next day was a shorter day so i hope that i would at least be able to do two days in a row we didn't ever have to do anything you could go on this cruise and never go near a bike if you wanted to we got back to the ship with enough time to shower before dinner which was really good because we really needed a shower the bathrooms in our cabins were great and the toilet did come with a little surprise i do understand how weird that last sentence sounds but it is absolutely true the water in our toilets was river water and not fresh water so sometimes it would look a bit of a murky kind of color the merlin has to get fresh water from land so they try and preserve water wherever they can and to be honest i think this is the best idea ever i don't know why we don't do that on more cruises you don't need your water in the toilet to be clean the water was clean in the shower the water was clean in the tap it was just in the toilet that there was river water and no it did not smell our second dinner was a beaten cheese starter roasted guinea fowl maine and an eaten mess for dessert i had a vegetable risotto which again was fantastic the menu was displayed each day ahead of time on a board by the entrance so if you saw something you didn't like you could always speak to christina and she would come up with an alternative christina was already making separate dishes for vegetarians and for people with allergies so it may just be that if you didn't like the meat maine you could have for example the vegetarian maine in its place our tour guide leah took us out for a walk in the evening and even though leah herself wasn't german she did speak german and she knew a lot about the places that we were visiting it was so much more interesting to wander around a town with her than it would have been alone she pointed out things that i honestly would have just walked right by it was on the next day that i forgot to check the daily schedule and i very nearly missed the included cable car ride our morning started earlier than the first day and we left for our cycle around 9am it was on our schedule as the short day at only 30 kilometers but the temperatures were steadily rising at this point we stopped to have a drink and to use the toilets in a local cafe and it was around now that i discovered the wonder of this thing that is called a cool towel before going on this trip i asked you if you had any staying cool recommendations and this magical towel was mentioned again and again you wet it and through some sort of magical science it gets very very cold you will see this around my neck in most of my photos and videos going forward we saw the merlin go by and those of us who were feeling strong greeted the ship in the traditional way it was only one of us who were feeling strong on this day later in the cruise i stayed on board so i was able to see what it was like from the merlin's perspective when the passengers greet the ship in this way it wasn't long after this photo was taken that my friend rita fell off her bike when i was busy being the signpost there our guide had to cycle back to the merlin with rita's bike plus her own i was just about getting to grips with cycling a bike by myself i can't imagine cycling and bringing another bike along at the same time but leah did it like it was just nothing it was so easy rita got the ferry across to the ship and we cycled the rest of the way in total our journey that day was around 25 kilometers we got back to the ship quite early in the afternoon so we decided to go out for a walk i thought that the cable car ride was in the evening but the cable car was going to be closed that evening so it was moved on the schedule the schedule is always displayed on these tv screens around the merlin so it was absolutely my fault for not checking but thankfully because we were in such a small group phoned me and told me that the group were heading off to the cable car and that if i wanted to i could walk and meet them there we walked there we met them at the perfect time and i think that's a benefit of sailing on a ship that is this small if i was on a regular river ship if i was on an ocean ship nobody would have noticed i was missing and they definitely wouldn't have phoned me to tell me to catch up with the rest of the group i'm glad we made it to the cable car even if it was like being in a greenhouse in there it was very very warm but the views at the top were absolutely worth it and we could see back along the river where we had cycled earlier in the day the cable car ticket was included in our cruise fare as was a wine tasting and a few other things if i hadn't have made it back with the group said that he would have refunded me the ticket price which is very very nice most companies wouldn't bother doing that dinner was a tomato soup a duck breast mane and a creme brulee for dessert and after dinner leah talked to us about the plan for the next day she did this every day but on this day the tone was different normally she'd talk about the amazing places that we would see how far we would cycle but this day's talk was mostly about how hot the weather was gonna get leah said that it might be a good idea if some of us stayed on board the boat as the temperature was getting up to 37 degrees which is 98 fahrenheit and on the schedule was another 40 kilometer cycle we decided right there and then to spend the next day on the ship not just because of the heat but also to give our legs and to give our bums a break when you're not used to cycling sitting on that seat for hours does take some getting used to but we did get used to it towards the end of the cruise but a break was overdue i was also very interested what would it be like staying on board a barge and a few of the other guests decided to stay on board as well i did not rush up in the morning because i was tired and i was loving the beds in the cabins they're actually air beds and when i think of an air bed i think of the type of bed that leaves you half the way to the floor in the middle of the night but these beds were nothing like that you would not know that they were air beds if it wasn't for the remote control that was in the bedside table they were very very comfortable you could adjust the firmness if you wanted to and we had the room set up with the beds pushed together but you could also have twins if that's what you prefer in the cabin there was a kettle there was a safe and there were four european plug sockets two by the desk and two by the bed that is better than most cruise ship cabins there wasn't much storage but there was this little area with a few shelves and a hanging section down here i don't think that much more storage could be really added though after all this is a barge and on a cruise like this it's kind of like which cycling t-shirt will i wear today this one on this one so we didn't really need much storage we mostly lived out of our packing cubes and out of our suitcases and that was totally fine when i did finally get up we were heading through a lock which is something that happens quite often on river cruises the boat basically goes into a little holding area and the water level either rises or drops so that the ship can then sail on happily on the new level i've been through locks on the bigger ships before but going through a lock on a boat this small is very very different we saw some incredible scenery going by and we did spend most of the day sat out on the front deck enjoying the sunshine the temperatures were pretty high but there was a breeze that was really nice and we could always go back inside whenever we wanted to the merlin has air conditioning everywhere and we definitely needed it during this cruise i loved being on the barge when nobody else was there the bar does shut during the day so that the crew can have a bit of a break but there's always a tea and coffee machine there there's a water machine there there's a little thing of biscuits there's a fruit bowl so you don't really need the bar during the day the merlin has a total of six crew members on board the owners kuhn and christina june adam and stelian who worked on the ship and leah who was our guide everybody was fantastic and nothing was ever too much trouble it was interesting to me to see just how many jobs each crew member had one minute you'd see adam in the bar and the next minute you'd see him cleaning something out the front of the ship we docked a little bit before 1pm and we spent the afternoon looking around a place called cockham on a regular cruise it isn't unusual to dock around 1pm anyway so even though we had missed the cycle ride it didn't really feel as though we missed anything we still had our day to explore the other guests didn't get back until around 4 p.m and they told us stories of their day their 45 kilometer cycle had turned into closer to 55 and they'd also hiked up to see a castle on top of a hill all in 37 degree heat they had a great day but i'm absolutely sure that i made the right decision to stay on board plus at this point i could take off the boat day section from my crew's to-do list your british ism of the week is this we would call this a tick and we would tick something off of a list i'm pretty sure that australia agrees with us brits on this one but please let me know in the comments i know that in the us and in some places you would check something off of a list but we would always tick it off i was in the cabin when jono said something to me like emma look there's people swimming outside i was very used to ducks swimming by our window so i kind of assumed that this was what he meant but nope some of our fellow guests decided to go for a swim beside the boat to cool down in a seven day cruise like this there is one day where everybody has dinner on land and this was the day for us this gave us the chance to try a local restaurant and it also gave christina and a well-deserved evening off they both live and breathed the merlin and it was so nice for me to get to cruise on a cruise line that was family run there isn't a big team behind the scenes there is nobody behind the scenes everything is cool and christina every booking that's made on their website comes through to them and i'm sure with the big cruise lines when you make a booking they're happy about it you're a number on a list you're a point on a graph but when you cruise on a small ship that's family run like this you feel kind of more like a person and less like just a number it's a hard feeling to describe we ate in a restaurant by the river and i had a veggie burger and fries not particularly german but at this point i'd cycled 70 kilometers so i gave myself whatever i wanted on the next day's schedule was 40 kilometers cycling from cockham to zell and i decided to make myself a bonus sandwich which was always allowed if you wanted more food for lunch or breakfast or dinner you could always ask christina and everybody was welcome to take you know a banana from breakfast or something out with them on their cycle ride at this point i hoped that my legs and more importantly my bum had recovered enough for another day of cycling our cycle ride made a stop in a beautiful place called belstein and it was only really when we stopped that you actually felt the heat when you were cycling of course you had a breeze constantly but when you stopped you could really tell how warm it was it was on this day that my camera decided to leap to its death i cycled over a bumpy bridge and somehow my camera decided to unscrew itself and throw itself under jono's bike my actual camera stayed perfectly on the mount and the mountain stayed perfectly on my bike but the two pieces unscrewed each other and it fell this camera is the main thing that i filmed most of my youtube videos on so of course i was sad that it was broken but the camera did die for a good cause and the footage which i filmed up to this point was safe which was the main thing if the memory card had been crushed as bad as the lens i would have been more upset i can replace the camera but i cannot replace those cycles that we already did there isn't any sort of evening entertainment on the boat but it really is not needed most big river cruise ships will have bands playing or they'll have comedians but that's because the boat is sailing a lot of the time and everybody is on board on our cruise we would have dinner we'd have the talk from our guide and we'd walk around the place that we were docked then we might have a drink or two but by that point we wanted to go to bed i didn't realize pre-cruise just how long we would spend docked in each place but we really only sailed for a couple of hours at a time or we sailed while we were out cycling we boarded the ship in zell and the boat sailed to a place called trabantrava while we were having dinner when we arrived we went for an evening wine tasting session at the winery of stork which was also included in our cruise fair we tasted six different wines and we learned a little bit about the winery and also the history of how the winery works with the merlin at this point we had a couple more cycle rides on the schedule and i felt as though i had one more day cycling in me i decided that the next day i would stay on the boat and i'm so glad i made that decision because it was this day that i learned what happens if somebody cannot carry on if they go out for a cycle ride and then they need to come back to the boat what happens i found out when i woke up i found donuts on the bar which is always a very good start to the day and captain invited me to the wheelhouse at the back of the ship to see him in his natural habitat and i got to see sasha the gorgeous beagle having a little dream a little snooze it was now that got a call from leah our guide saying that the winds had picked up a lot and a couple of the guests wanted to come back to the ship we were already sailing at this point but and leah worked out a place where we could stop and that was added into the schedule of course the boat is in the taxi where you can just snap your fingers and have it dock wherever you'd like but there is some flexibility there and if can change the schedule to help he always will the merlin does have some e-bikes that you can use and i think we had six people on e-bikes during our cruise this just made it easier if you were cycling in the wind or if you were cycling up a hill the people who had the e-bikes described them to me as just kind of a supercharge you're just being boosted you still have to cycle but everything is just way easier it's like having super powerful legs my mini cat hudson seen here did try out the e-bikes but his paws were not long enough to reach the pedals he didn't come cycling the funny thing was that i was not the only person traveling with the toy mascot i don't think i've ever been on a cruise before where my fellow guests have also bought their toys to dinner at this point we knew each other so well so it was only right that our toys also met it was while out that our group found a wooden train called emma which is such a coincidence that i stayed on board for a morning and then they found this i was really nervous about who would be on this cruise before i went on it but i should not have been worried we had the best group and we got to cycle together in the day we did dinner together we'd go out together in the evenings and you get to know your fellow guests in a way that i've never done on a cruise before there were people on our cruise who wanted to go off and do extra cycles and because we were almost always docked that was not a problem you could go out whenever you wanted the next day we had a tour in the morning in tria with a local guide which was a very welcome break from the saddle on the schedule was another short day at 25 kilometers so i hope that i would be okay it's very funny how your perceptions change as time goes on if you told me in the past that 25 kilometers of cycling was short i would have laughed at you at this point we were very close to the luxembourg border and as a group we decided we might as well go to luxembourg we've come this close we'll just go across the bridge and cycle into luxembourg what i found amazing about luxembourg was that all the trains trams and buses are free for everybody all of the time and in germany during the summer you can buy a 9 euro train ticket for a month a full month for nine euros you would honestly be lucky to get 20 minutes on a train in the uk for nine euros let alone a month our next stop on our cycle rider was a harley davidson shop a couple of my new friends mark and rita love their harley-davidson motorcycles and as we were close by we decided that this would be a good place to get a drink i don't think that i'm going to be swapping my bike for a motorbike anytime soon but it was nice to have a drink and kind of sit under a tree in the sunshine i didn't really spend much extra on this cruise i would buy the odd drink or the odd snack while i was on land and i also bought a few drinks in the bar on board but i didn't come off with a huge onboard spend which was really nice a cruise like this on the merlin costs around 200 euros per person per night which considering that includes your room that includes your food that includes your trips out every day i think is pretty good of course there are only 12 cabins on board so capacity is obviously limited and some itineraries do sell out pretty quickly this is the first cruise i've ever been on in my life where i just didn't bother locking my cabin door genuinely by the end of the cruise i wouldn't bother locking my door because i knew everybody and i trusted everybody you can't say that for most cruises finishing the cycle ride and riding up to the boat for the last time was absolutely amazing everybody congratulated each other everybody high-fived each other i am planning on returning and cruising on the merlin again next year so if you do fancy it and trust me if i can do it anybody can do it i may see you on board when we were in port one day on this cruise we were docked next to a tui rivership and i did recently take a cruise with tui i remember when i took that to e river cruise i thought that the ship was absolutely tiny compared of course to ocean ships but having been on the merlin and looking at the tui ship the tui ship looked absolutely huge to find out what it was like on my tui river cruise and why i didn't like the bathroom design check out this video next hi hudson what do you have to say hmm

Channel: Emma Cruises

Views: 180,430

Keywords: cruise, cruise tips, emma cruises

Id: jPDUwRzpFXU

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022