Dateline: Vienna, Austria

It’s been a long and eventful day, culminating with a very nice evening in one of my three favorite European cities (the other two being London and Barcelona). I forgot to set my alarm this morning, so I overslept by a significant amount and woke up ten minutes before I was supposed to be in the foyer to meet the group. I was not an intern for nothing, I made it with several minutes to spare. We were docked in the small town of Melk, Austria. I knew nothing about Melk, other than the character Adso of Melk from The Name of the Rose. (I read the novel in college – everyone did in the mid 80s and I remember going to see the film on a date with Teresa Mosteller back during med school days.). Adso is the Christian Slater part, a role that exists so William of Baskerville can talk to him and provide the reader/audience with all of the necessary exposition. From that, I expected Melk to be another cramped medieval town with an abbey. I was wrong.

Melk is like a miniature version of Passau (which itself isn’t so large). All baroque buildings (replacing earlier medieval and gothic structures) and dominated by an enormous baroque fantasia of an abbey and church perched on a crag high above the town. (It is a bit of climb to reach it). The abbot in the early 18th century had all the original buildings pulled down as old fashioned and created his new monument to god in the new style. The edifice remains a working monastery and abbey with a community of thirty some monks (none in evidence) who still administer the building, grounds and surrounding parishes whose primary income now comes from tourism. There is also an active middle/high school on the premises with more than 900 students. They were also not in evidence. I assume they were on summer break.

The tour of the abbey and grounds included a museum portion. (Not very exciting – the usual reliquaries, monstrances, croziers and medieval paintings of saints and madonnas), a stunning library (which took me back to The Name of the Rose again), and the church itself with more marble, gilded cherubs, frescoes ceilings, and other rococo touches than you could shake a stick at. The gardens adjoining, also perched on the crag above the Danube valley, were also lovely and ranged from a baroque formal garden with clipped topiary to delicately arranged wild gardens of tamed forest and beds of shade plants with meandering gravel paths. Lovely views out over the countryside as well. Very reminiscent of the opening helicopter shots in the credits sequence of The Sound of Music.

Back down the hill and back on the boat. (There really isn’t anything else in Melk but the abbey) and off we steamed into the Wachau valley of the Danube. It’s a place where the river cuts through the foothills of the Alps so fairly steep mountains hem in the river with little villages clining to the few places they can be built. One of them is Willendorf (as in Venus of) so it’s been occupied for about 30,000 years. Lots of terraced vineyards and orchards clinging to the sides of hills. The major products appear to be wine and apricots.

After leaving the Wachau, the scenery became much less interesting, wider plains with various levels of agriculture, occasionally broken by a riverside industrial plant so I took a nap until it was time to dress for dinner. We docked just outside of Vienna and were told to put on our best for a Viennese night out. We were bussed into downtown Vienna to an address just off the Hofburg, across the street from the Kaiser Josefplatz called the Palais Palavicini. It’s an 18th century nobleman’s house, still occupied by the family, but they let out the formal rooms for events so up the grand staircase to a lovely 18th century banquet hall for dinner with live music, singers, dancers from the Staatsoper ballet on a summer side gig, and far too much wine and champagne. It was really quite lovely (and not the kind of thing one expects from this sort of tour – but Tauck tries to do things up right) but the night was a bit warm and there is a distinct lack of central air in 18th century town residences.

Bus back to the ship, a digestif and ready for bed. I don’t have a story tonight, but rather a rumination. As we were driving the not very interesting highway into Vienna with my usual empty seat beside me (I’m the only person in the group travelling alone), I was wondering what Steve or Tommy might have made of the trip. Tommy and I had been talking about a Rhine Danube cruise together for a year or so before he died but we could never get the timing to work out with his three varied jobs and their odd calendars. He would have liked the ship and the pace of the trip as it would have been fine with his respiratory and orthopedic issues. He would have had acerbic comments on the food and on some of the entertainments offered (as those were both areas of expertise). I think he would have enjoyed learning more about German and Austrian culture but would have stopped sight seeing about the third Gothic cathedral. He was never a big sight seer. He was much more about the people to people piece of traveling. I probably could have parked him in an apartment in Amsterdam or Budapest for two weeks and then met up with him after the trip and he would have been happy going to the local shops and cafes and getting to know the locals and their routines. Steve, on the other hand, would have been bouncing out of bed every morning raring to go and ready to see something new. He would also have been incredibly frustrated at the lack of English language signage. (‘How am I supposed to read that?’ would have come from his lips about ten times a day). We’re in a part of Europe where most people speak some English but he would still have been miffed at their lack of an American accent. Steve and I never got the chance to travel abroad other than Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. I am both sad and grateful for this. On his bad days, he could elevate the ugly American stereotype into George Carlinesque poetry and guess who would have gotten the brunt. Eventually I’ll find a new travelling companion of some sort (applications are open – I’m thinking the big 2020 trip will be in April). In the meantime, I can keep myself reasonable company.

Dateline: Passau, Germany and Northern Austria

I woke up this morning to find the boat tied up quayside in the lovely little university town of Passau, just over the border from Austria, located where the Danube meets two major tributaries, the Inn and the Ilz. As it was 7 AM and we weren’t due to arrive in town until after 9 AM, we obviously made good time last night, A lot of other river boats made good time too as we were tied up three abreast at the docks. We weren’t going to be in town very long so I decided to skip the formal guided tour and set out exploring on my own.

The main part of the town is basically built on a sandbar between the Danube and Inn rivers. The Romans, who originally settled the area, had wisely not placed their city their due to the propensity to flood, but later, during the Holy Roman Empire, they had better flood control systems and people moved off the high ground and onto the river plain. There was a flourishing medieval town for hundreds of years that grew quite rich from the river trading routes. The local pooh-bah, an archbishop I believe, decided that the gothic architecture of the middle ages was far too old fashioned for someone of his wealth and stature. A mysterious fire then happened in the mid 1600s leveling pretty much everything and when it came time to rebuild, they went for baroque. The central city on its spit of land is a jewelbox of baroque architectural styles, all painted various candy pastels and culminating the cathedral whose baroque lines and rococo interior must be seen to be believed.

It didn’t take me more than a few hours to explore town (it’s not very big). I happened upon a large used book store which occupied me for a while. I bought a couple of prints. I can read a little German so I perused, picking out words here and there and bought two books about the structure, politics, and art of the German Kabarett (which will be useful for a couple of upcoing projects. I’ll have to get Diane McNaron to do some translating.

At noon, the cathedral had an organ concert showing off their enormous organ system (actually five interlocked organs playable from a single console , nearly 18,000 pipes and ranks in the nave, both transepts and the ceiling. When everything is going at once, it’s very much surround sound. The concert started with Tocotta and Fugue in D minor by Bach (of course) and included a few other pieces as well. Then it was back to the ship for yet another sausage lunch and then one more last walk before weighing anchor and heading into Austria.

The little towns along the river all look like shots from the title sequence to the Sound of Music as we continue to glide by and run through the occasional lock, down stream this time. Our entertainment tonight was a piano/violin/cello trio playing three centuries of Austrian music. They weren’t very good (and I wasn’t about to tell them that Edelweiss is about as Austrian as Chevrolet). I’d had a third cocktail so someone convinced me to sing with the lounge pianist (a very nice Australian lady named Margie). I think I made it through Night and Day.

And so to bed. First Austrian stop in the morning. No story tonight. Too tired.

Dateline: Regensburg, Germany and points east.

We crossed over from the Main-Danube canal into the Danube sometime when I was sleeping and made our first stop on that river at the town of Regensburg this morning. The Danube, despite Johan Strauss’s propaganda, is not a beautiful blue, not even this close to its source. It’s more of a muddy green/brown but as I have no intentions of swimming in it, that’s neither here nor there.

Regensburg dates back to Roman times and the cathedral is built on the site of an old Roman temple (pieces of which can still be seen in the crypt) and is another one of those small Germanic river ports that we have been calling at all week. I did not feel like another guided tour of the cathedral and old town (which seemed fairly indistinguishable from various other cathedrals and old towns we’ve been to this week) so I struck out on my own walking tour, leaving the old town behind to take a look at the more modern city outside the medieval walls. Not that different from the modern US city with plenty of handy Aldi grocery stores. There is a lovely greenbelt with walking paths surrounding the historic town so I walked along that as well. The one thing I noticed was no squirrels in the parks. I don’t know if there’s been a coordinated extermination campaign, they simply aren’t around or the species here are nocturnal. It was just a little odd.

I must admit I did poke my head into the cathedral (more interesting on the outside than the inside), wander the old town a bit (like most of the others, a pedestrian/bike friendly zone of shops and cafes), and finally caught up with the group as they were about to enter der schloss. The local palace is still a private residence, belonging to the princely family of Thurn and Taxis. As they more or less invented the modern postal system and had a monopoly on it for several centuries, they aren’t hurting for money. The dowager princess Gloria is in residence (she was not included on the tour) and her, son the Prince is off somewhere in Italy. The dowager is my age so I thought perhaps she could use a walker, but my German is probably not good enough to get by. The prince, unmarried, is a bit young for me at 36 but I could be talked into it. However, I am unlikely to be able to give him children and dynasty is important.

As for the palace, the newer parts (late 19th century), aren’t that interesting and the state rooms are not very good rococo (MNM would love it). It is a real working palace, continually hosting various events and it’s interesting to peep a bit behind the scenes. it’s also built out of the remnants of a medieval monastery and those pieces which date back more than a thousand years with Romanesque design and Gothic additions were much more interesting. Some of the monastic cloisters still exist and were much more interesting than the baroque fantasia upstairs.

Then, back through town and everyone on the bus. The ship had already headed downstream due to the threat of low water from Europe’s current heat wave. The water levels remain high enough for smooth sailing and we were only slightly inconvenienced when the tour company sent the wrong coordinates for the docking station to the bus drivers leading to a meandering tour of the German countryside while everything was sorted out. I helped the Australian-American family of five with their jigsaw in the lounge for a while and so to bed.

I think my first encounter with royal palaces was in 1984 when I made my first European trip. My first few stops were Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and I don’t recall any palaces in those places – my first encounters were in France when I got to Paris. Like all good tourists, one of my first stops was the Louvre. This is before the IM Pei redesign and the pyramid. I paid my francs (pre Euros) and entered. I remember being very impressed by some of the larger rooms and galleries but also marveling at how cramped some of the rest of it felt. It also had the filthiest public toilet I think I’ve ever come across. I immediately exited and held it for several more hours. Several days later, it was time for Versailles. I lucked out and came on the one day a month that they turned on the fountains. They don’t do it more often then that as 17th century plumbing is somewhat delicate. As I wandered the grounds on a hot and humid July day, I wondered what it would have been like to have been outside in 17th and 18th century court dress and immediately understood why the fountains were so important. As for the palace itself, lovely but not to my taste and the famous hall of mirrors was much smaller than it had been in my imagination. As I continued through Europe, I went to more castles and palaces and ultimately had to marvel at just how ordinary some of them were. I think my favorite was the Danish Royal Palace from the 19th century whose name escapes me which struck me in terms of its contents and layout as a Victorian era garage sale. Give me a domestic space that looks lived in by real people and has a good HVAC system.

Dateline: Nuremburg Germany and points south east:

We’re in the process of navigating the last of the locks that lift us up and over the European continental divide to the Danube river. We should be done and on the downhill slope sometime after midnight our time. We arrive in Regensburg in the morning, then it’s on to Passau and Austria. That makes this roughly the half way point of this vacation. It’s been a good one and it’s giving me some ideas for what to look for in a 2020 trip but that won’t happen until next April at the earliest so there’s plenty of time to make plans.

I awoke this morning with the ship tied up to the pier in Nuremburg. I was a bit discombobulated as the first thing I saw when I looked out the window was a replica Mississippi river boat entitled ‘Mississippi Queen’ with a home port of New Orleans. I couldn’t figure out what it was doing in Germany. It wouldn’t be able to travel the waterways very well as the smoke stacks were much to high for the multiple low bridges. Perhaps they are retractable. I had breakfast (my Scottish grandmother would be happy with the amount of oatmeal I’m eating at the breakfast buffet) and then it was everyone on the bus for the ride into Nuremburg, about 20 minutes away. There were two choices this morning: one a tour focused on the medieval past of the city as a seat of the Holy Roman Emperor and one focused on its peculiar role in Hitler’s Third Reich. I have had enough of madonnas and churches so I opted for the latter.

We had a drive through town, past a number of the historic sites and then headed out into the suburbs into the area where the Nazis had constructed their parade grounds and stadia for their annual rallies. Many of the original structures planned had never been built or did not survive the war but enough were left to get a sense of the scale of that the Nazi’s were trying to achieve with their massed forces, torchlight parades, and war games. It was all very Triumph of the Will. The famous zeppelin field was closed for some sort of car racing but we did go to the huge stadium, designed to seat 50,000 that is now mostly in ruin. It’s too expensive to tear down and too expensive to repair and when you look at this monumental brick edifice and realize that most of the bricks required slave labor, it’s hearbreaking. The city has had the good sense to put their museum about the history of Nuremburg and how it intertwines with Nazism in part of it so we spent a couple of hours there. It’s intense. Not as devastating as the Holocaust Museum in DC as the focus is more on the social conditions in Bavaria that enabled Hitler’s rise to power and how he kept returning to Nuremburg for his big annual rallies and gatherings of the brain trust. (Think the Nuremburg laws). We also went to the palace of justice which contains the famous courtroom 600 where the Nuremburg trials were held after the war. To stand in the same place where the evils of the Nazi regime were exposed on the international stage and the foundations for international law were placed was quite moving.

After that, we had a couple of hours free in the old quarter of the city. I used it to climb up to the old imperial palace, with its commanding view of the city from it’\s verandas, and then to descend back into town via Albrecht Durer’s house and finally the toy museum. This latter was the perfect anecdote to a surfeit of Nazism from earlier in the day. Germany has long been a leader in the production of toys and games and the industry has been centered in Nuremburg since early in the 20th century. Displays of toy soldiers of various types, model railways, doll houses dating back to the mid 1800s (my favorite being a doll millinery shop from about 1870 with the most savage looking proprietress who looked like she would as soon bite her doll customers as outfit them with a new picture hat). The post war galleries were a bit disconcerting as I saw a few things that I have owned or still owned lovingly preserved behind glass. I guess I am aging into a museum piece.

Then, it was time to bus back to the ship, ooh and aah at the last three locks on the Main-Danube canal which lift the ship about 80 feet apiece (and look like the entrance to a particularly dreary level of hell as you sail up to them), and have a lovely dinner and one too many cocktails. (Which is why there is no story tonight. Maybe tomorrow. We continue to sail all night but I shall be asleep (hopefully for all of it).

Dateline: Bamberg, Germany and points east

We’ve turned off the Main river and into the Main-Danube canal that connects the Rhine watershed with the Danube watershed, leading to a water transportation route across Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea. The idea for the canal was first proposed by Charlemagne well over a thousand years ago but they didn’t actually getting around to constructing it until after World War II, finally finishing in 1992. The canal is a good deal smaller than I imagined. Just enough room for two river boats to pass and with small locks and low bridges everywhere strictly limiting the size of vessels. This is why all the river boats have roughly the same plan, no matter the company. I think they’re all made by the same manufacturer in Switzerland with just little tweaks in the design.

Today was another low energy morning. For some reason i woke up at 4:30 AM raring to go, but it was far too early to be up and moving about. I watched some TV, read a few chapters and ultimately broke out the laptop and finished the last 2,000 words on the next chunk of the book I’m trying to write. This whole bit ended up being slightly over 6,000 words. I’ve now got somewhere around 10,000 words down on paper which is about 20-30% of book length. The editor I’m working with thinks I have something here so maybe, if I can keep churning pieces out, it may actually come to fruition. I’m going to try to get one more chunk done before I go into rehearsal for Choir Boy as I am unlikely to get anything done during that four week period.

The shingles continue to be a problem. I wandered off to the Apotheke this afternoon and bought capsacin cream and an ice back. The heat was not a successful trial. I’m going to try the ice later tonight. The pack is still cooling down int he minibar fridge. The arc is toward slow improvement but this is now week six and I’m really ready for the symptoms to go away. It’s very odd to have what feel like small electric shocks to ones navel.

We reached today’s destination, Bamberg, in the early afternoon. The dock was a rather depressing looking industrial area so we boarded busses for the mile or so into the central city. Where Rothenburg was a celebration of the medieval style, Bamberg is going for Baroque. The city is dominated by a large cathedral (aren’t they all?) which is in sort of a transition between Romanesque and early Gothic style. Next door is the Archbishop’s palace which was based somewhat on Versailles with very baroque lines. Below them is the center of town which is bisected by a small river and which seems to be a hodgepodge of styles from the last millennium. Bamberg was relatively untouched by World War II so a lot of the architecture is original.

The city is a bit of a regional hub and a good deal larger than some of the other places we have been stopping recently. It’s Saturday so everyone has come into town from the outlying villages to do their shopping and the central shopping area was full of life and ordinary Germans doing ordinary things. I spent some time shopping, but didn’t buy a whole lot. Also a lot of the amiable chit chat one does with tour travel companions. As there’s only 63 of us, we’ve all pretty much IDd each other at this point and sat together for at least one meal.

We left Bamberg early evening and continued along the Main-Danube canal. Uneventful so far but some of the locks are a bit of a tight squeeze. We’re due in Nuremburg tomorrow morning.

Tonight’s story is a short one. I could probably come up with longer and more involved ones if the waitstaff wouldn’t keep filling my wine glass at dinner. I was reminded of it as I sat on deck this evening watching the countryside glide by as we split the dead calm waters of the canal. It struck me that in some ways, this cruise is a very long log flume ride. I’ve always been partial to log flumes at amusement parks, even if you do get wet. Maybe because it was one of the few kinds of rides that my mother would get on. She had terrible vertigo issues with most roller coasters and things. I remember her being very green when she got off the Matterhorn at Disney many years ago. She was a bit perturbed at my father who had convinced her that it wasn’t really a roller coaster. Anyway, years later, Steve and I were on one of our annual trips to Disneyland in California. Steve adored Disneyland. He had grown up in Southern California and it opened when he was seven and he went with his parents the first week it was open and back again at least once a year most of the rest of his life. We were there on some weekday (we avoided weekends – crowds). We did all the usuals but were a bit disappointed that the big new ride, Splash Mountain, was not yet operational. Later in the summer the sign said. About two that afternoon, an announcement came over the PA system that they were going to beta test Splash Mountain that afternoon with park goers and that it would be open starting now. We hightailed it across the park and became two of the first paying customers to ride. It’s a good thing we did too as the word got out quickly and the park was inundated with local season pass holders eager to sample the new attraction. As the line grew impossibly long, we smiled, and headed for Pirates of the Caribbean. Sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time.

Dateline: Rothenburg, Germany and points east

I woke up this morning in the town of Wurzburg. As I slept in, something of a hazard on a cruise where the liquor is included and there is no bar bill, I didn’t have a lot of time to explore this particular town but I did get a brief look at the Archbishop’s Residence. His excellency certainly had taste and money to burn.

After brunch, it was on the bus and a trip down the autobahn for about 70 km to the town of Rothenburg. The autobahn was safer than I thought. There were a couple of large Mercedes in the left lane whizzing by at enormous rates of speed but the vast majority of drivers seemed to understand that 100 km/hr (60 mph) was entirely appropriate for the road and conditions. The Bavarian countryside was quite rural with fields of grain and a smell of cows. There were a lot of power generating windmills in the fields. Germany wishes to be fossil fuel free and it looks like they’re going to make it.

We approached Rothenburg through the new part of the city, which looked like most other suburban towns but with architecture reminiscent of German Medieval styles, got off the bus, walked through a gate in the city wall and into the old town. The town is a well preserved medieval city. In the 11th through 14th centuries, it was an important trading center at the intersection of a couple of major trade routes. By the Renaissance, trade patterns had changed and it devolved into a sleepy down off the beaten track and the money and prestige left leaving the medieval architecture and city planning behind. it existed for a few hundred more years, without a lot of notice until the Romantic poets of the 19th century discovered it as a fairly intact medieval town, and it was visited and made famous by Hoffman, Schiller, the brothers Grimm etc. By 1900, the locals realized they had a major tourist destination on their hands and they worked to maintain it’s style and charm. World War II bombs damaged about a third of the town, but it was rebuilt on it’s original design and remains a UNESCO world heritage site.

The old town is relatively small, still surrounded by its defensive town wall and filled with medieval half timbered houses and other buildings. It’s very much a Grimm fairy tale come to life and you can easily see the characters from Into the Woods venturing out from one of the city gates into the countryside to get their wish. I did some shopping, buying a watercolor of one of the towers from a local artist, toured the church, the city hall (but did not climb the twelve flights of stairs up the tower), and walked the trail around the town which wound through gardens and the galleries of the old city walls and defensive towers.

Then it was back on the bus and off to meet the boat which had moved upstream to Ochsenfurt. This evening, we’ve been continuing up the Main and through more locks as we continue to climb towards the Danube. Post dinner entertainment was a German Oom-pah band. They were better than the one from the biergarten in Rudesheim and didn’t try to include Jimmy Buffet in their repertoire. I decided to treat my shingles with one to many Rudesheim coffees and, being in a pleasant mood, had a nice conversation with the lounge pianist before retiring to bed and to write this update. I can’t think of a good story tonight. Must be the brandy. Hopefully one will occur to me tomorrow. We’re not docking until lunch time so I get to sleep in.

Dateline: The Main River Waterway, Germany

Today was strictly a sailing day. I slept through Frankfurt but woke up soon after as the ship bumped into another one of the 68 locks between the Rhine and the Danube. The Main River is now pretty much a shipping channel connecting the two great rivers. As they are at very different elevations, the ship has to be lifted up into the center of Europe by several thousand feet. This is obviously impractical without a lock system.

Unlike the Rhine, the Main is not a particularly large river and, with a lock every mile or two, it’s more like an interconnected series of calm finger lakes than anything else. With a river boat plodding along at a slow 10 knots, an absolutely glorious day weather wise, and a still calm water, in some ways it feels a little like Bavaria Land at Disney. Cute little towns appear, glide by and disappear. There’s the occasional low bridge which leads to them needing to lower the wheel house and have everyone on deck sit down and duck while we clear by centimeters. The picture perfect flocks of ducks and geese, and even the occasional swan look as if they could be animatronic.

I spent some time on deck basking in the sun, some time reading (a reread of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories – there was a copy in the front of an Amsterdam book shop and I took it as a sign), I got an MNM column finished, and wrote another 2000 words on the book chapter. I finished it all up with a nap before dinner. Tonight was Captain’s dinner (they had to come up with something as we had no stop today) with surf and turf and entirely too much wine. It was followed by a classic dance party in the lounge. Watching a number of tipsy baby boomers gyrate to the music of their misbegotten youth got old after a while so I came downstairs to watch another movie and to get to bed early. Tomorrow looks to be a bit of a long day.

Story time tonight is prompted by a day on a boat. The summer of 1981, when I was 19, my father helped me get a job on the University of Washington research vessel, the Thomas G. Thompson. It was to spend two months in the Bering Sea and they needed someone to run the water sampling machinery at night so that the scientists could keep normal hours. It wasn’t a hard job, it paid well (with no ability for me to actually spend any of my earnings – not a lot to do in the sub Arctic, and it came with a lot of down time. (I was able to read the unabridged War and Peace in less than a week). I found myself bound for Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians by plane that June where I met the ship and began my sojourn. I must confess that I was seasick the first day out of port, but after that initial bout, I was fine for the rest of the trip. I ate well, read a good deal, watched a quantity of bad 70s films, and visited several places such as the Pribilof Islands and Nunivak Island that are not on the beaten path. There isn’t much there but I did go to one of the seal rookeries. Let me tell you bull seals can move quite fast on land when they want to. They also smell terrible in congregation. Nothing terribly exciting happened during my time at sea but it does mean that when we’re playing exotic places you’ve been to that no one else has, I often win.

Tomorrow is Wurzburg and Rothburg so I should have something more interesting to say.

Dateline: Rudesheim, Germany and points south east.

Five weeks in to the battle of the shingles and the right side is hurting worse than ever. Fortunately, I packed enough Celebrex, Gabapentin, and Tylenol to last through the trip and it’s my sincere hope that it will be down to a dull roar by the time I get back. I’m not looking forward to full work and rehearsal schedules feeling like this. At least on vacation in Europe, I can add a little alcohol to the mix as I don’t have anywhere to be as long as I’m on the ship by all aboard and I’m not in charge of the driving.

I woke up this morning, having steamed through Bonn and Koblenz overnight, to find us in the famous middle Rhine valley, where the river cuts through jagged cliffs with picturesque towns hugging the river banks and medieval castles perched on the hills above. It’s been an absolutely gorgeous blue sky day, a bit warm for Europe in the 80s, but perfect for sitting in a lounge chair and watching thousands of years of history glide by. The captain maneuvered us around the Lorelei rock without incident and we passed towns like Boppard and Kreuzbach. I don’t recall the names of most of the castles. Many of them were at least partially blown up in the late 17th century on the order of Louis XIV of France. Castle restoration seems to have become a cottage industry in recent decades and many which were a ruin last time I passed this way thirty five years ago have been repaired. They now seem to function mainly as youth hostels or boutique hotels.

On my last trip, I took the train through this part of the Rhine Valley. Boat is much preferable. The speed is a good deal slower giving you time to appreciate what you’re looking at and you’re sitting on deck listening to the rushing of the water and smelling the wind as it comes down off the vineyards and into the gorge which is much nicer than sitting in a hermetically sealed Deutsche Bahn train car. The gorge isn’t all that long so we had more or less finished our traverse by noon when we docked at Rudesheim, the quaint little town on the right bank that marks the beginning of the mountainous stretch. The much larger town of Bingen is across the river and from what I could ascertain, is not as pretty.

I had never heard of Rudesheim before but it turned out to be a very old riverside town of about 5,000 whose buidings had more or less survived World War II as there was no bridge and it wasn’t big enough for anyone to bother much about. We got off the boat, had lunch in a restaurant cum beer hall in the center of town (where the Oom-pah band had an eclectic range of selections from Andrew Lloyd Weber to Jimmy Buffet) – schnitzel of course,but with kartoffelen rather than noodles. It was accompanied by a nice Riesling, the product of the local vineyards which climbed up the hill behind the town. Dessert was apfel strudel with Rudesheim coffee, another local specialty. Think Irish coffee but with about three times as much brandy and the coffee pot being waved in the general direction of the glass.

After lunch, a visit to the local museum – a collection of those enormous mechanical music boxes from the turn of the last century that play pianos, organs, violins, and what not, all housed in a 16th century house that still has some of the original fresco art on the walls and ceiling. Then it was time for a gondola ride of the hill behind town, the Niederwald. At the top is a very large monument of Germania dedicated to something Kaiser Wilhelm I did sometime in the 1870s. I think it had something to do with the German unification of 1871 but my German isn’t that good and there were no helpful English translations on the noticeboards. Then back down, a stroll through town, and on board for dinner, more Riesling, another Rudisheim coffee, party games, and bed.

As we began dinner, we turned off the Rhine onto the Main. We pass through Frankfurt sometime either tonight or tomorrow morning. No docking tomorrow, just a river day due to the large number of locks in the Main canal system as we float up and over the continental divide toward the Danube. As it’s such a small group of passengers, we are starting to get to know one and other and I think we’ll manage to keep ourselves entertained.

I owe a story. This one’s a family history story. (Saunders cousins, please correct me if I have any details wrong). At dinner tonight, was me, a gay couple – one American and one Australian who currently live at Lake Tahoe, and a New Zealand couple. The conversation got onto war stories and somebody brought up the Hyde Park Barracks. This is a large brick military installation in central London, across the street from Hyde Park. My great grandmother (maternal grandfather’s mother), Lucy Anderson Meiklejohn had a number of brothers and sisters. One of her brothers was named Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn. (For those of you into oceanography, you should recognize the name Matthew Fontaine Maury – he more or less founded the field in the 19th century). He was a friend of the family and so one of the son’s was named after him. MFM Meiklejohn was a military man and served with the Gordon Highlanders and found himself shipped to South Africa to serve in the Second Boer War. (My great grandparents were South African colonials and settled at Grahamstown far from the fighting. My grandfather wouldn’t be born for another four years or so). At the Battle of Elandslaagte, the Highlanders were breaking and MFMM rallied the troops and led them on to victory. He was shot multiple times and ended up losing an arm but won the Victoria Cross for gallantry. A number of years later, in 1913, while he was stationed at the Hyde Park Barracks, he was exercising his horse in the park. Something spooked the horse and it bolted and he had difficulty controlling it with only one arm. He was about to run down a nursemaid with small children in tow and, instead, turned his horse into the barracks wall. The impact killed him. There is a memorial plaque on the wall where it happened. It was still there last time I went to London and looked. There is a brief Wikipedia article about him.

Dateline: Cologne, Germany and Points South.

We continued to motor up the Rhine river all night and, as the scenery seemed to be mainly the back sides of apartment houses and chemical refineries, alleviated by the occasional industrial site and cargo ship dock, I decided I could sleep in a bit this morning and laid around reading and watching a not so good movie that MNM will get her claws into shortly. Habitation and bridges started to increase around 11 AM as we headed into the suburbs of Cologne, docking right next to the Hohenzollern Bridge leading into the main train station, just a few hundred yards from the famous cathedral. I have been to Cologne before, but frankly, I remember next to nothing about it. I know I went to the cathedral, as that’s what you do in Cologne but for the life of me, I can’r remember another thing about the city from my grand tour of the early 80s.

In the thirty five years since I was last here, they have redone Cathedral square with some contemporary museums and cultural amenities such as concert halls and one very large venue dedicated to Broadway Style musicals. Our tour guide wasn’t very happy with that one. It has a ‘temporary’ canvas roof that never seems to be replaced with a permanent structure and she considered it a bit of an eyesore. I would have been interested in checking out what was being offered this evening, but alas, our ship departed at 6:30 PM. Far too early to partake in any of the local night life.

The cathedral remains magnificent, still undergoing repair work from a combination of World War II bombs and time and the elements. The entire plan and the apse date back to the 13th century but most of it was actually constructed in the 19th century when Cologne finally had the funds to finish the job. There was damage from the Allied bombers. (It was too close to the train station and Rhine bridges not to sustain some) but it mainly survived intact and they have been carefully restoring and repairing all of the intricate stonework ever since. The locals took down most of the stained glass during the war so many of the medieval windows survived. Where windows did not (primarily the 19th century windows in the newer parts of the church) they have been replaced with modernist patterns of stained glass which still give color and light, but which remind us all of the casualties of war. The old altar is dedicated to the magi and their bones rest in an impressive gold and silver reliquary. Whether it’s actually the magi or not is a source of some debate, but the provenance can be traced back to Helena, mother of Constantine, who brought the bodies out of the holy land in the 4th century. My guess is she was snookered by the locals on her relic hunt but either way, they’re bones that have seen a lot of history.

After craning my neck looking up for an hour or so, it was off to the Ludwig museum. This is new since my last trip as it wasn’t opened until the late 80s or early 90s. Herr Ludwig, a German chocolatier of a previous generation, developed quite the interest in modern art and assembled quite the collection, especially of early 20th century artists. There are many Picassos, Kandinskys, Klees, Noldes etc. Dali’s Railway Station at Perpignan is there, and much larger than I had imagined. It is all well displayed with galleries explaining all of the different directions 20th century art traveled and how it was reacting to social and other artistic trends. The later 20th century and 21st century collection was more of a mixed bag. A lot of Pop Art as apparently Mr. Ludwig was a fan so bunches of Warhol and Liechtenstein.

Then it was time for a bit of a walk through town. I did some shopping, but didn’t buy anything. walked on the railway bridge to see the padlocks (It’s a German version of the bridge in Paris – couples put a padlock on the bridge to lock in their love. 40,000 and counting at this point.). As it’s a strong iron railway bridge, there will never be a need to remove them due to weight. They’ll run out of padlock room first. Then, back down to the river, back on board, and time for dinner. We’re continuing to sail upstream. We should pass through Bonn sometime after midnight and arrive at the Lorelei Rock and the beginning of the middle Rhine with all of the cliffs and castles sometime tomorrow morning.

Shingles are hurting and I can’t think of a good story immediately so I am going to sign off here and pick up again tomorrow.

Dateline: Nijmegen, The Netherlands and points east

Today was the first full formal touring day, complete with motor coaches, canal boats, and tour guides waving signs and saying follow me please. At least the major tour groups have all gone with these little boxes with an ear piece and every tour guide has a different channel. Now we can all hear what he or she is saying while he or she converses in a normal tone, rather than a dozen people braying in front of the Night Watch all at once, each in his or her own language.

This was the last Amsterdam day. Up relatively early, attack the breakfast buffet (think upscale American hotel, only with roast tomatoes and baked beans next to the scrambled eggs), and then on the bus. A short trip to the museum area (although given Amsterdam traffic, I could have walked it faster) and then an hour in the museum with a guide going through the 17th century Dutch masterpieces. I’d already been, of course, but the guide had some interesting observations and I was able to get into a friendly argument on who the master of the period was. She argued Rembrandt. I argued Vermeer.

This was followed by a two hour cruise of the canals complete with gourmet white table cloth lunch. It really is the nicest way to see the city. Most of the city remains pretty much as I remember it from my previous visit other than the harbor area. Most of the shipping and industry has moved out of the heart of Amsterdam and there are now new artificial islands full of expensive condos dotted around. There is also, for reasons unknown to me, a floating Chinese restaurant that’s a copy of one in Hong Kong. Not even the guide could explain that one.

After lunch, we had a few hours of unstructured time so I took one last walk through the city. Will I ever come back? It better be before another thirty five years pass because at that point I’ll be 92 and unlikely to be able to take the same kind of long urban walks that I currently enjoy. Then it was back on the bus. The ship had departed Amsterdam some hours previously and we were to reboard at Nijmegen, a town in central Holland on the Waal River, then through a series of rivers and canals and on to the Rhine. We’re due in Cologne tomorrow around lunch time. The bus ride through Holland was like a trip through a Dutch Landscape with it’s flat fields and hedge rows and occasional plane trees. Only one windmill, alas. Little towns of brick would pop up here and there but most of what was close to the highway were big box stores and an occasional industrial park. The ninety minute trip took two and a half hours due to repeated traffic jams. Dutch traffic jams are similar to the American variety only the drivers are more patient and more polite.

I can’t say I saw much of Nijmegen. If I remember my WW II history correctly, it was bombed heavily by the Allies around the time of the Battle of the Bulge and so most of the construction isn’t terribly historic and looked like suburbia pretty much anywhere. The boat was drawn up at a quay near a bridge that had some strategic WW II importance and is still standing and we headed upstream through cocktail hour and dinner. I’m now in my cabin, having retired early. I am on the cheap floor and so my bed is actually below the waterline. I have a couple of small windows high up just above waterline so I stretch, I can watch the banks roll by. They aren’t overly interesting but I did catch a glimpse of a band of wild horses as we passed by a nature preserve.

I should write a new column tonight. We’ll see if I get around to it. Tonight’s story will therefore be the birth of MNM or how did Andy end up writing a movie review column… When I moved to Birmingham with Steve in the late 90s, we didn’t exactly have a lot of friends and, when his health started to deteriorate, he didn’t exactly have a lot of energy to go out and make new ones. I was lonely and in bopping around on the internet (the web was about six or seven years old at that point and people were starting to learn how to exploit its capabilities) and found a couple of sites for gay men where guys would chat and make snarky commentary on pop culture. On one of these boards, everyone had a bit of a camp handle of some sort so, in thinking about various camp icons, I pulled Mrs. Norman Maine (the Judy Garland character in A Star is Born) out of thin air and started to use it to sign my posts. Once there was a name, a personality soon followed. About a year later, I stumbled on a website entitled epinions.com. It was one of the first attempts to monetize a website where the content was created by the consumers, rather than professionals. You could basically write reviews, of the type now on Amazon and if other users liked and upvoted them and trusted your opinions, you could make a little money and become a member of a community. Films were one of the categories available and Steve and I were avid moviegoers so one day, I sat down, created an account in the name of Mrs. Norman Maine and wrote a review of the movie we had seen the week before (the not very good remake of Shaft IIRC). Somebody out there liked it. I wrote another one, then another, and soon I was pounding out a couple a week. The first few weren’t very good (I rewrote them later) but as I continued to write them, they began to improve immesurably and she began to build up a fan base. I wrote steadily for epinions for nearly five years, a time when Steve’s health got worse, he eventually died, and I had to pull myself out of my funk of grief and professional ennui. The columns I wrote through that period were a form of therapy. All of the major events of my life were paralleled in MNM’s fictional world and I was able to pour all of my creativity and theatricallity that life circumstance would not let me exercise, into her madcap mythical adventures. By late 2004, Tommy and I were together and thriving and we began our real life theatrical adventures. I no longer needed MNM and so I let her be. About ten years later Epinions went defunct. When I heard about that, I went in and downloaded all the old columns as they did represent a lot of effort on my part. There were 365 of them about film. (I had written an occasional review on something else and I excluded them from the canon although I do have copies of them stashed somewhere). Shortly after, I was contacted by a couple of epinions film people who had started their own film website and they asked me to resurrect her. I agreed and back she came to MovieRewind.com where she remains. There are about 165 columns in the new series. One of these days, I’ll figure out what to do with over 500 film review columns written by an alter-ego. It’s probably enough for a whole series of books. MNM’s inspirations are Paul Rudnick’s Libby Gelman-Waxner from the old Premiere Magazine, Jim Bloom’s Joe-Bob Briggs, and the novels of Patrick Dennis. I’ve always written versions of my real life and friends into the columns. Tell me you’re a fan and you’ll likely end up in one.