DAY 120 MONDAY JULY 23 HEIDELBERG

Last night as usual we found it hard to get anything on TV that was interesting even though the speech was all German.  BBC NEWS becomes repetitive quickly.  But we found a Bavarian music show that featured Tyrolean style music and really enjoyed that.

The four part harmony groups made me realise I was missing first Fridays at Mavis's place.  We loved the young accordianist who played on his own but also with his father and grandfather.

We have had several problems with our stay at Leonardo Hotel in Vienna and the staff have been unable to rectify them so they provided us with a free buffet breakfast this morning and we made the most of that.  We are booked in at a Paris hotel tomorrow night so we chose to travel to Heidelberg today which involved 7 hours or more on 3 trains, all German and very comfortable so we have had a quiet time, following the Danube for quite a bit of the trip.  At Heidelberg Station we booked our seats on tomorrow's trains to Paris as the ticket office in Vienna was not allowed to do it.  There are a lot of awkward restrictions put on Eurail customers, but we have so far not been left stranded and have covered a lot of track distance with our pass.  We found our nice little family hotel, Pension Schmitt,  and walked through the Hauptstrasse of the Alt Stadt.  The describe it as Romantik and the tourists love the car free streets,

the fountains, the statues, the Rathaus,

and of course  the churches.