We decided to change our route just a bit to visit Xanten. Xanten was the site of a Roman settlement and also has large cathedral. Xanten is about 10 miles short of our planned destination Wissel so our ride today was short. This also means that the ride tomorrow will be longer.
Additional maps didn't stop us from getting lost once again. We were on track until the cycling path adjacent to the road stopped and we took a path through the country-side. We came to a point were there were no direction signs and had to guess which way to go. Eventually we did find another cycling path with destination signs (e.g. Xanten 23 km) and followed these. It turns out we were quite far away from the Rhine. I don't think it added distance to our but it did add time since we often stopped trying to find our location on the map.
We had not made arrangement for accommodations and our first stop was the information center. Since Xanten is a tourist town and it was Saturday night, accommodations were mostly booked. They were able to find us some accommodations outside of town which we gladly took. The lesson is that we need to book Saturday night stays well ahead of time.
Xanten has a nice pedestrian area with many shops and cafes. Once we had our reservations confirmed, we were able to relax with some ice cream and coffee.
Xanten is an amazing city. Roman ruins, a huge cathedral and a windmill all withing walking distance of each other. I did manage to get all three into the same picture. Pictures will be posted later I'm having some slight technical difficulties.
The Cathedral in the downtown core took over 200 years to build and has several large gates surrounding it. While you can see the church steeples from all over town, most of the church is not visible until you pass through one of the gates. This makes for a very dramatic scene but it also makes it very difficult to take pictures. Even with my 18 mm lens, I could not get more that a small portion of the cathedral in the frame.
We then wandered through the old city (altstadt) looking at the working windmill the city walls. The archaeological park containing the Roman ruins just outside the downtown core. Xanten was initially used as a military base for the Romans in 15 BC and a city was built there around 100 AD. We walked around the Roman temple and the colosseum. At this point everybody was tired and hungry and we started to our B&B. Luckily it was not as far as we had thought.
The day ended with a light meal and a some soccer on the front lawn of the B&B.
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