October 17, 2023

Dateline – Passau, Germany

Thank you to those of you who have inquired. I spoke to my father this evening and he is feeling much improved so he should be out of the hospital and back to his usual environs shortly. My brother and sister whom are both Seattle based have everything under control. I would like to be able to check on him in person when he is feeling poorly but 7500 miles makes that a bit impractical. Heck, even the usual 2500 miles is an obstacle.

Today was a relatively slow day. I woke up this morning to chilly temperatures (mid 30s) and put an extra layer on. One of the benefits of a Seattle upbringing is that I always pack for a sixty degree variance in temperature no matter the destination or time of year and can layer up or down for pretty much any climatic shift. We had arrived overnight in the small river city of Passau where three rivers, the Danube, the Inn and the Ils all come together to form the major channel of the Danube on its way downstream. I have been to Passau before, most recently on my Rhine/Danube cruise in 2019. It’s not very big and I figured it hasn’t changed that much in five years (heck I don’t think the historic center of Passau has changed much in the last three hundred years) so I again decided to skip the walking tour of the town and instead boarded a bus headed out into the Bavarian forest.

There, fifteen or twenty of us intrepid souls, went on a nature hike through a Grimm’s fairy tale woodland as designed by Eliot Porter and had a lovely time walking for a couple of miles through the trees, complete with a stop for a schnapps tasting in a closed for the winter beer garden. It was all quite nice. I arrived back at the ship around one and took myself on a walking tour of the town. The weather, which had cleared up for the nature walk, started turning ominous again so I stuck my nose into the cathedral (full of scaffolding as it is undergoing a major restoration/renovation), the town hall area, and my favorite German language antiquarian book sellers on cathedral square. i bought a small early 19th century print of a barber surgeon for my art collection. Then it was time for a nap before dinner.

Cocktails before dinner, wine with dinner and an Irish coffee with the chocolate buffet after dinner put me in a good mood so I finally broke down and agreed to sing with the lounge pianist toward the end of the evening. I sang a few of my karaoke standards and then we dusted on ‘Your The Top’ which was somewhat hysterical as he didn’t really know it and his trying to read rapidfire English lyrics when his first language is Portuguese led to some malapropisms of which Cole Porter would certainly have approved.

We get off the boat in the morning in Regensburg and at some point get on a train to Berlin. As Princess Gloria of Thurn and Taxis did not respond to her invitation to my last birthday party, I’m not sure how much attention I’m going to give the town.