The trip went well with the borrowed Birdy Blue in a heavy-duty laundry bag for Eurostar, TGV and ICE. The bag was rolled up and stuffed into small Ortlieb panniers on the front rack, which were more than enough to carry everything for the five days away.
Not so much in the way of specific sightseeing, other than the German Roadbuilding Museum in Germersheim. I suspect we were the only visitors that day and possibly the only visitors that week. For a civil engineer or transport enthusiast, there is enough of interest but I could see Philip's eyes glazing over within minutes. Not many places have displays of types of guard rails or of vintage steel drum rollers. The sections of Roman road and an excavated medieval wooden bridge was more interesting though. Everything is German language only (as you'd expect) but I knew enough schoolboy German and the engineering behind it to understand the explanatory placards.
Mostly we cruised along the Rhine, trying to dodge the flooded bits, though T42 knows that we got it quite wrong at least once. Most days we had to reroute around flooded sections but that was pretty trivial most times, just picking the other side of the flood wall.
Much of the time we travelled on the west bank as the cross-river ferries were not running due to the flooding and bridges weren't that frequent. Even the cargo vessels only started towards the end of the week. We swapped to the east bank for the last day and half and there was a noticeable difference in visible wealth.
