~80km today, again rather unpleasantly hot, but nice scenery, and some hills.
Last night’s campsite was part of a Canoe club, where they were holding a birthday party for (I assume) one of the members. So it was a bit noisy, but luckily I had ear plugs with me. They seemed to sing happy Birthday in English (but with “lieber Michael”, instead of “dear Michael”), followed by the same thing, to the same tune, but in German. Then lots of hurrahing.
I set off along the Main to Miltenberg, which was very pretty.
Then headed up the Erf Valley towards Hardheim. This was a bit hilly, and at one point the (until then) very nice bike path turned into a rough forest track, which I ended up pushing the bike along for a mile or so.
At some point I picked up the Tauber river, and followed that along the valley. Lots of apple trees and pretty towns and villages. There were lots of piles of logs stacked up too
Eventually I made it to Laudenbach after a Lidl stop in Bad Mertgentheim (pretty much everything is closed on Sundays in Germany, so I needed to stock up).
The camp site is very nice – all the facilities are very new, and they sell nice local wine by the glass. I’m enjoying a very nice rose as I write this.
The village is also having a festival today; Keller-Kul-Tour. I had a wander around earlier, and went to a musical theatre show. I wasn’t really sure what to expect (besides it stretching my German to the limit and then some), but it was good fun. Essentially the actress was playing the part of an actress auditioning for a show to “Herr Direktor”. This then morphed into an Opera in the boogie-woogie style(!), involving a Knight (who I *think*came back as a ghost after he got squashed by a tree). The actress then decided she’d be better off as a music critic. I think at that point the pianist revealed himself to be the director after all. And all that in 45 minutes! I was very glad not to be sat on the front row, as there was some audience participation. The actual actress was an excellent singer, and did a great job. It was all good fun, even though I was really struggling to understand what was going on a lot of the time!
They’re doing 4 shows tonight, which must be exhausting. A fellow camper (who’s a native German speaker) is going to a later one, so hopefully I’ll get to find out how much I actually understood.
On the way back to the campsite I noticed a sign for a Wurstmachine. At first I thought it was a joke about this:
But no, it’s a real thing:
Anyway, that’ll do for today…
