On The Road By The Rhine
We had followed along the lower reaches of the Rhine, through the little land of dykes and windmills, when the idea occurred to us: why not make the Rhine tour en automobile? This, perhaps, was no new and unheard-of thing, but the Rhine tour is classic and should not be left out of any one's travelling education, even if it is old-fashioned.
At Nymegen we saw the last of Holland and soon crossed the frontier. There were no restrictions then in force against the entrance of foreign automobiles, though we were threatened with new and stringent regulations soon to be put in force. (1906. A full résumé of these new regulations will be found in the appendix.) Legally Germany could demand eight marks a hundred kilos for the weight of our machine, but in practice all tourists were admitted free, provided one could convince the official that he intended to return across the frontier within a reasonable time.
As we crossed the railway line we made our obeisance to the German customs authorities, saluted the black and white barber's-pole stripes of the frontier post, and filled up our tanks with gasoline, which had now assumed the name of benzin, instead of benzine, as in Holland.
Emmerich, Cleves, Wesel, and Xanten are not tourist points, and in spite of the wealth of history and romance which surrounds their very names, they had little attraction for us. For once were going to make a tour of convention.
It is a fairly long step from Nymegen to Düsseldorf, one hundred and one kilometres, but we did it between breakfast and lunch, in spite of the difficulty of finding our way about by roads and regulations which were new to us.
The low, flat banks of the Rhine below Düsseldorf have much the same characteristics that they have in Holland, and, if the roadways are sometimes bad as to surface—and they are terrible in the neighbourhood of Crefield—they are at least flat and otherwise suited to speed, though legally you are held down to thirty kilometres an hour.
You may find anything you like in the way of hotel accommodation at Düsseldorf, from the Park Hotel on the Cornelius Platz, at Waldorf prices, to the modest and characteristic little German inn by the name of Prince Alexanders Hof, which is as cheap as a French hotel of its class, and about as good.
