Wine Princesses Everywhere

Today was parade day in Neustadt, so we took a lazy morning to do some laundry before venturing out for the big event of the day.

Frau Veth’s cute dog, Tony

As we’ve found before with trying to do laundry in Europe, it takes a lot of time. Lots and lots of time. The machines are

quite small so you can only do very small loads at a time. Then the washing machine takes forever to run. Once it’s finally done, the dryer takes even longer to get your clothes sort of dry. Frau Veth told us she tends to dry them part way and then hang them on the line outside.

Heading to the parade

We figured she probably does that to save on electricity, so we’d better follow suit. Our first load was just a few pairs of jeans and a shirt or two. It took an hour to wash, then after a while in the dryer we hung them out, even though they were still quite wet. We have a feeling it could be a long time until they are dry since it is so humid around here.

Waiting for the parade

We headed down into town about an hour before the parade started to check out the route. Lots of people were unfolding and setting up wooden benches to stake out their spots. Others came well prepared with full tables set up in the back of trucks, along with lots of food and drink. We finally found a spot near some food and wine stands that had a good view and waited for things to begin.

Two buddies sharing a great viewing spot

Finally the parade started and we saw lots of small town bands and local wine princesses for EVERY local small town. The various groups in the parade where all numbered, and the last group was number 133. That is a lot of bands and a lot of wine princesses (plus one chestnut princess).

A wine princess!

And along with many of the princesses and some of the other ‘floats’ were people pouring wine into the glass of any bystander.

So Mike figured we needed to be part of the local culture and went to get us a glass of wine. We quickly finished that off so that we, too, could fully participate in the local custom of the wine festival parade!

Fitting in with the locals

It was a verrrry long parade, lasting about 2.5 to 3 hours. We watched many small bands consisting of a broad range of ages and lots of brass instruments, all wearing quite colorful uniforms.

One of many colorful bands

There were also a lots and lots of wine princesses. Usually their ‘float’ was either a very nice Porsche or old roadster, or was pulled by a tractor (and we even saw an old Porsche diesel tractor – wish we had gotten a picture for Brent) and everyone on the float had a wine glass at hand.

Now that’s a glass of wine!

We were towards the end of the route and there were a lot of very happy parade participants by the time they got to us. Each princess also had a nice big glass of wine. And they weren’t just for show. We noticed that many of the floats had wine tables set up in the middle with half full wine cups for all the participants.

Stopping to refill the band members glasses

Those who were walking regularly went back to their float to have their glasses topped up.
It was a lot of fun to watch and everyone was having a wonderful time, ourselves included. It did start to rain at the very end, so we hustled on back to our apartment after having a quick dinner of more brats.

Good music

Returning to our apartment we found that the outdoor laundry was still quite damp, so we busily spread all our wet laundry on top of the numerous radiators and turned them to high. But we will have clean clothes again!

More pictures: Mike fitting right in. Of course, each pour is small and he has to share with Peggy and Tami…