Life After Work: A Day In Frankfurt

We sailed all night and had a few bumps as we passed through some locks going from the Rhine to the Main River. When we woke up, we were in Frankfurt. The weather on all of our devices said it was currently rainy with a chance of a storm. But, when we looked out it was cloudy with a chance of sun. It's nice when they're wrong in a good way.

Our guide was great and took us along the river and through the city until we reached the old city. Again, much of Frankfurt was destroyed in the war, but some areas survived.

The first pictures are from our walk along the Main River towards the old part of town.

This is a chestnut tree with pink flowers. We hadn't seen that before.

This is one of the buildings that wasn't destroyed by bombing. It also has an interesting story. Apparently many fire fighters risked their lives to keep the fires away from the building as everything else burned. The story is that the owner of the building promised the fire fighters free beer if his building was saved.

This is a panoramic shot of the square in the old city.

Next, we visited a market that was something like our St. Lawrence Market but with a German twist! We wandered around and had a sampling of the local sausage.

Our next stop was the Main Tower. It was 54 floors to the observation deck. The elevator was small and cramped but the ride to the top floor was quick. Once at the top, we had some great views of the city.

In the next shot from the tower, you can see a wide tree lined street. That intrigued us so we made our way over there later in the afternoon.

On our way back to the boat for lunch, we found a park area that our guide had mentioned earlier. It was built near some large buildings that created a micro climate that allowed semi tropical plants to survive.

After lunch, we set off again on our own tour. The weather had cleared quite a bit so we didn't take rain gear. (Insert ominous foreshadowing music. ) Once we were back in the older part of the city we found an outdoor market of sorts that had food trucks and many different stalls. If we hadn't just eaten lunch, I know there were a couple of stands we would have visited.

White asparagus, or spargel, must be in season as we are seeing it everywhere. We've even had it as part of a couple of meals on the boat.

As we exited the market we saw the tree lined street just ahead. It turned out to be a major pedestrian mall that was very crowded. It was Friday and the day previous was the May Day holiday so we think lots of people were off work.

We noticed that the weather was changing fairly quickly so we started to head back to the boat but I slowed us down with more photos. We saw some very creative parking and interesting buildings.

And, of course the skies opened up when we were still a fair distance from the ship. We managed to walk beside buildings and under trees for a while but then we just gave in and got wet. Luckily, there's a drier on the boat that we used when we got back.

Once we were dry and had a small glass of warming red wine, we decided to head back out and explore a bit more of Franfurt. This time we crossed one of the many bridges to see what was on the other side. The bridge turned out to be another pedestrian walkway where a jazz band happened to be playing.

We also noticed that there were locks all over the bridge, which was similar to what we had seen in Paris.

We saw this view of Frankfurt as well. It gives a better view of the core and some of the construction that is going on.

This is the River Duchess. We hadn't had a view from above before.

Finally, here are a few shots of last night's dinner. They pair specific wines with each meal and tonight we had wine from a vineyard we'll visit tomorrow.

Gratin Chicken Mushroom Ragout