8-1 to Mainz

Thanks to a morning shower and a cloudy day, the heat was much less of a problem. A varied route to ride: leaving Worms we followed the Rhine through the port area for a few km, then past many modest houses overlooking the river. Reputedly, these neighborhoods are favored for river ship captains to buy for retirement. Could do worse. Then we rode atop dikes and through fields. After a nasty 2 km stretch of rough and rutted rocky trail on one dike we reached Oppenheim (wonder if Robt. Oppenheimer's family came from there?), a pretty town where we stopped for coffee and chatted with a solo bike tourist from Brittany. Turns out he lives near Guarec, where we spent a week four years ago at an International Tandem Rally. Small world. The route turned away from the river for a while through beautiful vineyards. I took a postcard-scene pic for the blog but lost it somehow. Then back down to the river and a several km of good scenery but rough rocky path until the outskirts of Mainz. We reached an impasse on the trail (from construction and also some unspecified emergency on the river), but just then a German woman came to guide us along an alternative path around the problem. She winters near our home, on Anna Maria Island. Entering Mainz, we rode along the riverside promenade to our hotel. Quite a contrast to go in a few minutes from a hot, dusty, rocky trail to a 4-star hotel.
Before dinner we visited the Mainz Cathedral. Older than and very different from all the other cathedrals we've visited. Before they figured out how to support exterior walls from bulging out, buildings could be only so tall and windows had to be small. As a result, Romanesque churches like the Mainz Dom are dark and gloomy. If you go to visit one, take a flashlight. What we could see, we did enjoy.

We stayed two nights in Mainz, a city we actually did visit many years ago with Melissa and her family when Greg was stationed in Wiesbaden.

Thursday, Aug. 2. My mother's birthday. She'd have been 101:
After a fine breakfast at the hotel, we walked to the Gutenberg Museum. His invention was not moveable type or the printing press, though he improved on both, but the antimony alloy for quickly casting type which wouldn't fracture under the pressure of the press. He printed about 200 bibles, which sold for the equivalent of today's $300,000 each. But all of his ideas were stolen and he died poor. There are 131 Gutenberg Bibles still unaccounted for, not including the ones stolen by the USSR after WW2. We took a tram tour of Mainz and got off at St. Stephen's Church, on a hill above the city. What's special about it is the stained glass windows by Marc Chagall. I took pictures, but better you Google them. From the church we made our way to the Ancient Ships Museum. In the 1980's the excavation for a hotel (our hotel, as it happens) turned up the remains of five Roman ships which they could date from tree ring patterns to the years around 300 AD. The museum has their remains plus many models in the 10' range and two full-sized Roman ship replicas. Fascinating. Then as today, they used molds over and over to build similar ships.
Back to our hotel for a rest, and then downstairs to a supper of potato chips and wine by the riverside promenade. Getting on the hotel elevator a Frenchman learned we're from Florida and said earnestly that we have to change the Stand Your Ground law. Startling, but couldn't agree more.