Sorry for the paucity of posts dear reader as we have been having too good a time and spare moments for this particular political animal have been taken up following the government shenanigans in Australia.
So far so good. We’ve walked much more than we’ve drunk which is often a good thing especially on a boat when drinks are free at certain times – lunch time and dinner time for us. This is fine except when it is necessary to debate the restaurant manager on the definition, specifically related to time, of lunch “time” and dinner “time”. This is only generally necessary when we are the last to leave which is most of the time.
While on the subject of drinking, I thought I’d heard it all and then I heard a tour guide at the Faust Brewery in Miltenberg, Germany say if you can’t manage steps you can stay in the sampling room and “help yourself”. I’d take that tour every afternoon.
There are more than 70 locks between Basel in Switzerland, where we started this cruise, and Budapest. When we go through them it’s like flying Indian Airlines through a cyclone. I know because I’ve had this rare pleasure. In most of the ones we have been through so far there has been about a foot to spare on both sides. So you can excuse the driver hitting the wall occasionally. But I’m at a loss to explain how a boat travelling at slow walking pace can hit a wall less than a foot away and throw you off the toilet. And it’s more severe at night. I’m not suggesting there are substances other than black coffee involved here but there is a chance the apprentice is given an opportunity to drive when we are pretty well straight-jacketed by high walls and almost no speed.
A comment here on the legendary German efficiency. We stopped for a couple of steins of Wurzberg’s finest at a quaint bar overlooking the old town square and struck the absolute antithesis of said efficiency. Our waitress had the attitude of a surly French waiter, the focus of a Fawlty Towers Manuel and the commitment of a Greek bureaucrat a week before retirement. I was beginning to think this legendary Teutonic planning is mythical. Prior to that we walked around this palace called The Residency and saw a gardener who managed to rake the same square foot of soil thirty or fourth times in the time it took us to walk past him. Maybe I’m confusing thoroughness with efficiency. But having three people to trim a tree was just too much. As best we could make out one of them was there to scowl at approaching tourists.