This is my compilation video of our 2025 Bike and Barge holiday with the Merlijn on the Moselle and Rhine in Germany.
The other videos I made during our trip are:
Jogging Tours:
Cycling Stages:
Other Videos:
You can see them all on my Merlijn YouTube Playlist at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn8Y8RvQYlDTijvDsvAQKW96sq1_YzzY0
This video section by section:
00:00 Introduction
00:42 The Moselle
00:57 The Merlijn
01:41 Inside the Merlijn
02:57 The Bikes
05:54 A Typical Day
06:30 What is the cycling like?
10:59 Early Morning Mist
11:37 Riders from Daun
13:13 My Merlijn Playlist
13:33 The Crew
13:48 The Guests
14:28 and Finally
For details about Bike and Barge holidays on the Merlijn see their website at: https://www.merlijn.nu
#koblenz #treis #germany #merlijn #moselle #mosel #cycling #cyclinglife #cyclist #cycleride #bikeandbarge #gopro
#daun #bernkastel #ediger
Hello viewer. We’re on a boat. In fact, we’re on the Merlin on the Miselle River in Germany. Sort of halfway up on the left hand side. Just been to Zel. I’ll show you on a map. Anyhow, we’re here for a week doing some biking and barging. So, the Miselle, of course, is wine country. And it strikes me they put vineyards anywhere, even on these vertical cliffs covered in vineyards. Merlin is a fully equipped small river cruise ship capable of hosting 24 passengers. She was built in 1930 as a freighter and converted to a luxurious and authentic cruise ship in 2002. Since then, she is without a doubt the most elegant lady on the European rivers. It says here and it’s totally true. Fantastic little ship. Very luxurious. Lovely crew. So, here’s here’s a little video I made of the inside of the boat. So, you can see the bar. This is the restaurant area. And here’s the famous Captain Nudson. Google it. So, if we go down here, down these stairs, we go technically below the water line. And this is where the cabins are. So, here’s our cabin. Relatively clean. And our bathroom. How cool is that? It’s really nice. Not at all what I expected on a converted barge. Oh, and here’s a view out our Porto. As you can see, we’re just above the water line. could be quite impressive when the swans go past. Here’s a swan photo my wife took. So, these are all our bicycles all nicely stacked up. Everyone’s got your name on the back so you can uh get the same bike every day. So, I wanted to give you a quick tour of our high-tech Yan Yansen bikes. So, Merlin has something like 25 of these and a whole load of e versions. So, I have the pedal version as you might expect. Some of the interesting features are it has a belt drive single belt single gear at the front and a nice Shimano 11speed integrated hub gear at the back. All apparently the best for servicing and maintenance and this sort of holders. You see we got a disc brake at the back, disc brake at the front, and in the hub, I believe there’s a dynamo which powers the light. And the top we got this nifty little thing here. Just shows what gear we’re in. The special Merlin bottle. a bell. And then down the back, oh yeah, it has your name on it. This means every time you get your own bike. And then here we have our special helmet with integrated communication system. So it’s do it makes a mesh network. So the person at the front can quite happily talk to the person at the back, providing there’s enough people in the middle to complete the mesh. And down here there’s a locking system. Very standard Northern European locking system. So nobody nicks your bike unless they want to carry it. There we go. A fine steed for spending four or five hours a day on. Quite comfortable actually. So this is a typical day. I was up at 6:30. Having said that, I must point out that I’m the only person that’s up at 6:30. Most people up are um 7 7:30. Breakfast for 8. Went for a jog up to the local castle. Back down again. Shower. Breakfast at 8:00. And then now it’s 9:00 and we’re all standing outside the boat organizing the bicycles. So, what’s the cycling like on a holiday like this? Well, I’m glad you asked because here’s a little montage of some of the uh cycling we’ve done. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. As you can see, the cycling is very pleasant. It’s pretty much all on small cycle tracks like this. Nicely paved, reasonably flat, very tight, very few hills, quite enjoyable. You don’t need to train to do it to cycle. You don’t need to train your legs to cycle though. You need to train your bottom because you will be sitting on the bicycle for possibly four hours a day, which uh can be quite hard if you’re not ready for it. And as far as the legs go, if you don’t find it so easy, then you can use an ebike. It’s uh I think most of the people, you know, we have a group of what 24 riders and I think most of them are probably on ebikes. It’s all about getting out here and seeing the scenery. It’s not a race. You know, if you’re doing one of these holidays and you want to train a bit, all you have to do is go up a few more gears than everybody else. That makes it quite hard. Then you’re training. So that was the end of day three, 60 km. Lovely cycling along the river through little villages behind me. You can see our boat just arriving, the Merlin. So, we’ve stopped cycling sort of in the middle of nowhere. The boat is now picking us up. We’ll put the bikes on board and then we’ll have uh dinner while we cruise up to Koken. Heat. Heat. So today we’re doing something a little weird. We’ve cycled about 1 and a half kilometers to a bus station. We’ve dropped the bikes with those nice people there and their truck and uh we’re going to walk around town and then we meet them. We’re back here in half an hour and we take a bus up the mountain. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. In total, I’ve made about 15 videos related to this holiday. Some are about the areas we visited, some are about the cycling, and some are about all sorts of other things. I will put a link to them all in the description below. action shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Heat. Heat. Well, thank you for watching my video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you tick the like button and I hope you subscribe to my channel. Hopefully see you in the next one.