(This post was supposed to go out yesterday, but there was some hiccup in the blog, apparently, so it never finished publishing....)
Travel will educate you, or that's how a German saying goes. You can certainly discover a lot of new things - for example, I was delighted to see this bit of stone and mortar when I was in Ingelheim:
This is a small part of a water pipeline from the end of the 8th century, built to bring good drinking water into the palatinate palace of Charlemagne. The canal was about 6.8 km long, following the principles of how Roman water lines were built.
It was not strictly necessary to build this to get water to the palace, as there was plenty of water around the place - but it provided much more high-quality, fresh drinking water in the palace, and the water was also used to feed wells. The