>“Space Shuttle lands on barge on the River Rhine”

Not really.

“Buran”, the Soviet equivalent to America’s space shuttle got decommisioned to Bahrain (look, I have no idea…) and the Technik Museum in Speyer – being dead keen on this sort of thing – snapped it up from an evidently unwilling owner for their quite excellent collection of aircraft and things that otherwise move along under their own steam (figuratively).

The Concorde and a B747, for example.

Then they thought “Bugger. How do we get it here?”

“Easy” someone said “Put it on 3 barges, zip down past Dubai, around the corner to Aden, up the Red Sea, through the Suez and the Med, through the English Channel, turn right at Rotterdam and up the Rhine, stopping at Mainz on the way”

This somehow got into the papers and there were more people lining the river that you could shake a stick at.

What with all the excitement, I didn’t want to spoil the party by pointing out that they appear to have lost the tail somewhere along the way….

11 Apr This entry was published on 11 April, 2008 at 16:30. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged Excitement. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.