short Rhein River cruise (round trip)?

Bad Säckingen and nearby Waldshut are attractive towns to visit. But I am not familiar with the river cruise opportunities in this area. My guess is that they're fairly limited. Here's a page from the Bad Säckingen website. There's one boat making a 2.5 hour round trip leaving BS at 14:30. But that's only on T, Th and Su until July 5; after that, they add Wed. and Friday. http://www.bad-saeckingen-tourismus.de/index.shtml?schiff The Rhine is an east-west affair in this area. The north-south section of the Rhine that gets the most interest is far to the north, the section that lies between Bingen and Koblenz; it might be worth a trip there to see the castles and scenery if you spend a couple of days, tour a castle or two, and see a few towns. Or for a shorter outing, travel to Schaffhausen and see the Rheinfall, or continue further east over to Bodensee (Lake Constance ) and travel across the lake on one of the ferries. The scenery is nice there.

Looking at the link Russ sent you, that boat trip is exactly what you asked for. The boat goes down (W) the river for 55 minutes making stops at Stein, Wallbach (CH), Wallbach (De), Brennet, ending in Schwörstadt. I goes maybe 1/5th of the way to Basel. After 5 min in Schwörstadt, it comes back up (E) the river, making the same stops, getting to Bad Säckingen in 1½ hr - 2½ hrs RT. Do it if you want the experience of a boat trip, but boats are slow. There is one trip a day and it doesn't look like it stop very long anywhere along the way. But it's easy to get to those town from Bad Säckingen. Schwörstadt is only 7 minutes by train from Bad Säckingen with a stop in Brennet. Wallbach is a 40 min walk from Bad Säckingen. Stein is right across the river, a 20 minute walk. There is a 23 minute bus from Bad Säckingen to Schwörstadt with frequent stops, including Wallbach and Brennet "It would be ideal to board a boat at the Southern most end of the Rhein". The southern most end of the Rhein is in Switzerland, south of Liechtenstein.

I may ruffle a lot of feathers by saying this, but in the three years I lived in Germany, the MOST frustrating and LEAST enjoyable "touristy" thing I did was a Rhein River cruise. Expensive, crowded, and full of short stops in adorable towns, with not enough time to do anything in the towns other than stop a few minutes at a trinket shop. Ugh! So - not saying that all Rhein cruises are awful - but be very careful. We basically felt that we had wasted a day when it was over, in spite of the beautiful scenery - which we could have seen and enjoyed at our own pace if we had instead simply driven along the Rhein in a car and stopped as we had pleased and at our own pace.

Melanie writes, "the MOST frustrating and LEAST enjoyable "touristy" thing I did was a Rhein River cruise. Expensive, crowded, and full of short stops in adorable towns, with not enough time to do anything in the towns other than stop a few minutes at a trinket shop." You aren't ruffling my feathers, Melanie. You're EXACTLY RIGHT. It can also be miserably hot on deck in summer. I'm a huge fan of the Rhine as a travel destination; a SHORT boat float is a nice add-on to a short stay in the area, part of the experience, but not THE experience, and unfortunately, many visitors arrange to take a 4-5 hour boat cruise, then leave. If you don't have time to wander through the villages, hike the cliffside trails between them, tour 2 or 3 thousand-year-old castles, stop in at a winery, linger at an outdoor cafe, etc., and stay at least two nights, then you should consider another destination, because the cruise alone isn't worth the trouble, even if it's free with an overpriced railpass. To your comments, I will only add that the train is an excellent way to get around from village to village along the Rhine. You can hop off, stay an hour or two, then hop back on again. You can travel up and down both sides of the river and see nearly the same scenery as from the boat, since the tracks follow the river's path. Trains run early in the morning and well into the evening; the latest equipment, the MRB and the VIA trains that serve every little hamlet, are modern, clean and dependable. And train travel here is unbelievably cheap. A 3-day train pass for 2-5 people covers the Rhine between Oberwesel in the south and Remagen in the north (and also the Mosel as far as Bullay) and costs 40 Euros. If your outdoor plans get rained out, you can sightsee by train for hours this way for very little.

Count me in on the "explore the Rhine by train" faction rather than by boat. It is so much easier to hop off the train to explore and then jump on the next train in an hour to go to the next village. I love traveling up one side of the Rhine and then back down the other side, viewing all the castles, admiring the houses and the old train stations, watching the ships, riding past the vineyards.