On Saturday, August 24th, we wanted to take a walk by the Rhine, so we took the train to Wiesbaden, and then to Ruedesheim. At Ruedesheim, a cute, touristy town, we took the cable car over the vineyards up to the Niederwald Monument.
The Niederwald Monument, high above the Rhine across from Bingen, was built in the 1870s to celebrate the unification of Germany. It has a 10.5-meter (34 foot) tall statue of Germania, on a huge pedestal with friezes and other sculptures. This gargantuan shout of German nationalism was set toward one end of a park that had been created in the latter half of the eighteenth century by Graf Karl Maximilian von Ostein, a proto-romantic combination of paths and buildings highlighting the forest and views of the Rhine. One of these buildings, a pseudo-Greek Temple, is just beyond the cable car station.
From Niedserwald, we walked through the woods to the other end of Ostein's park, finally arriving at the Jagdschloss ("hunting lodge") hotel-restaurant, where we had lunch.
After lunch, we took the ski-lift down to Assmannshausen.
We had hoped to get back to Mainz in time for the 6:30 mass at St. Stephan's church, but at this point, we were running late. We caught the ferry from Assmannshausen back to Reudesheim, hoping to catch the train, but we apparently missed that train, and the next one was 40 minutes late.
We got to St. Stephan's just before communion. After mass we looked at the stained-glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. Then we went to dinner--since our first experience at Zur Kanzel had been so good that we tried it again, with similar results. On returning to our hotel, I had to take a picture of the elephant in the lobby.
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