Legend has it that Milten was a Jewish comic with a propensity for cross dressing and stumbling along the cobbled streets of this hillside town, avoiding the horse droppings that present a peculiar hazard to size 9, spiked heels. The good people laughed, and he loved it. There’s a rumor about him and…but we are not maintaining this chronicle to give spine to idle gossip.
This story might have lived a longer life were it not for a 13-year old skeptical child with an iPhone and Wikipedia. My new companions are churlish about my squandered credibility, but none has given a more colorful or more accurate (the latter the lesser challenge) account of the city’s name. Miltenberg is an adorable place. It deserves a good story, but obviously that will now wait for another day.
We shared a round of local beer with Doreen and Brian, a delightful couple from Alberta, Canada who doubtless would have embraced the drag queen mythology if my skills of invention had matured more quickly. (Others may point out that maturity would keep such stories from seeing the warmth of a cerebral cortex, but they missed the point of starting in Amsterdam.) Our intimate little cave-room is charming but hot. Nevertheless, we remained ensconced while Brian, inspired by the local claim that G,I. Elvis Presley once had a drink (and many sausages, I bet) here, gave us factoids about “The King” that only a serious fanatic could compile and recite without pauses of recollection longer than manly gulps of dark brew demanded by this weather.
The strike is on…sort of. It is a work slowdown, so we lag behind our scheduled progress. Our ship could not reach Miltenberg, so we were bussed ahead for the daily tour, the bus return to be foreshortened by the ship’s modest progress, but as the locks have queues, the ship was late, and we were stranded on a hot afternoon at riverside. Rod and I made the best of it with a stroll through another local town, twice, after one delay is compounded by a second. Had we known the total amount of time from the beginning, my beer consumption could have been taken at a civil leisure.
Posted while drinking
Sambandar 