We stayed another day in Miltenberg but the glorious hot and sunny weather deserted us, and we had a warm showery day which we used for odd jobs and a bit of sightseeing around the town.
Next day we continued up the Main through the area the Germans called W-Land, because the River Main twists its way up and down making a large W as it goes. The next stop was another gem of a town called Wertheim. We stopped in the Wertheim Motor Boat Club just off the river and a stone’s throw from the centre of Wertheim. Sam climbed up to the castle at the top of the hill an Wendy and I did some shopping.
Then the wine country started. Mile after mile of vines and small wine towns. The weather was much cooler and we had showers on and off over the day and the ones that followed.
There were castles in the hills and the scenery matched that of the best parts of the River Neckar.
There were still very few cruisers and in fact until today when we moored up with 4 Dutch boats on the way back from Budapest we saw no other cruisers from out of the area. The Main is a difficult river to cruise. The locks can be slow both to fill and to wait outside for them to let you in. Sam was a great help with the locks and steering.
There are very few mooring places suitable for a boat our size. Everything is geared to boats under 9m. It needs careful planning to ensure you get to a suitable place each night and some days this entails a very long day. Still having gone up 333km of the river now we have spotted a few good places for our return journey in August, like this yacht harbour near Wurzburg.
The next major place we stopped at was Wurzburg, the largest town on the middle Main. Unfortunately there is nowhere for a boat our size to stay there so we continued up 10km to a lovely walled town called Eibelstadt where there was a great marina. with a friendly harbourmaster and best of all a super Italian restaurant in the marina itself where we could celebrate Wendy’s birthday. In the morning as we only had one bike (as a tyre had burst in the previous week’s heat), Sam biked along the Mainweg, a cycle path going the entire length of the River Main, to Wurzburg where he spent the day shopping and sightseeing. He rode up to the Marienburg Schloss
And admired the view of the River valley below and looked at the lovely castle gardens.
We asked where we could get the bike tyre fixed and the man we asked said “no problem” and drove it to a local bike shop and got it fixed for us.
After a well earned day’s rest we left Eibelstadt for Kitzinger the next day. Unfortunately Sam was quite ill with a temperature and aches and pains. He spent the next couple of days resting and dosing up with paracetamol which kept the temperature in check. Kitzinger was a lovely small town and we had a great mooring on the quay with our own flower bed right outside the boat. People kept coming up and chatting and we talked for a while with someone whose father was an
American GI, as many American and British forces were stationed around the area until only just recently. When we arrived we met a man who used to live in Warkworth (just North of Auckland for non NZers) and he was really chuffed to see a NZ boat. He came back with his daughter a few hours later and gave us a gift of a bottle of the local wine. That has been typical of the friendly people we have met throughout Germany.
Today was a long day as we had to make serious dent in the final leg on the River. We have stopped at Schweinfurt on a quay right by the town. It is the top of the final stroke of the W.
Tomorrow we head for Bamberg, an ancient mediaeval city where we leave the River Main after 384km and join the Rhine-Main-Danube canal towards Erlangen where we are meeting up with Nick, Monika, Viv, Les and Cindy for a few days, and sending Sam off on the long trip back to New Zealand.
