(Saturday, Sept. 19) When we checked into Hotel Maximilian on Wednesday, Gabi (one of two sisters who run the place) told us that on Saturday there would be a festival in the town on the other side of the nearby Lech River to celebrate the return of the sheep and cows from their summer pastures up in the mountains. Her niece would be conducting the brass band, and her brother (who we saw at the hotel from time to time) would be playing in it, too.
So after breakfast this morning we drove ten minutes or so to Lechaschau, found the beer tent across from the Penny Markt on the Hauptbanhof Strasse, parked the Beemer on the edge of field a couple blocks away, and walked back to the festival grounds. It wasn’t yet 11 am, but the band was playing, kids were dancing and running around in front of the stage, and beer was already being swilled by a large crowd. Outside, pens full of sheep, sheared to the skin, or waiting for their Fall “haircuts”, were bleating and milling about, bells jangling.
One of the sheep wranglers had on a T-shirt bearing the exhortation: “Go White Sox!”. A young helper about 12 years old tried to single out sheep that didn’t outweigh him and wrestle them over to the shearing pen. Once he gave up and just jumped aboard a sheep and tried to ride it, cowboy-style.
There was a shooting gallery where you could win a prize, but it wasn’t getting many takers, and the woman running it spent most of her time starring into space a smoking a cigarette while little kids whose parents wouldn’t give them money to try their luck picked up the air rifles and toyed with them. A guy selling vacuum cleaners wasn’t finding any buyers, but the cotton-candy and balloon man was doing okay.
By mid-day the tables in the beer tent were pretty full. We got a couple of wurst und brot (roast sausages with buns, a sort of do-it-yourself hot dog) and listened to the band. A ten year old kid served me my beer, and small kids helped the adults bus the tables. One guy with a beer-gut, red T-shirt, and green baseball cap, helped clear tables while wearing a stud earring in one ear and a cell phone blue-tooth gizmo in the other.
The cow parade was supposed to start at 2 pm, so we decided to see if we could find the cows starting place by following a trail of dirt and manure off towards the mountains. After walking a few blocks up streets of neatly kept homes adorned with flower gardens, we came to a large meadow and saw a group of kids and adults in traditional Tirloean garb. They turned out to be the “goat” contingent that would bring up the tail-end of the parade. One of them spoke a little English and told us where to find the best vantage point to see the parade down on the main drag.
When we got to the Hauptbahnhof Strasse, a few people had gathered, and some were sitting atop a wall running between the sidewalk and homes on the west side of the street. But within half an hour the crowd stretched along about a three block section of the main road through town.
The parade started few minutes late, and couldn’t have lasted more than twenty minutes. The cowherds marched down the street, yodeling and yelling, and occasionally having to yank their reluctant beasts past the crowd. The goats and their handlers took up the rear. When the last animal and marcher had entered the festival grounds, traffic that had been stopped in both directions began to flow, jerkily at first, starting, and then stopping, to let onlookers head back to the beer tent.
Instead of searching for beer, we went looking for the cows. Most of the sheep had long since been loaded into small trailers and hauled away, so we thought the cows would take their place in the pens behind the tent. But nary a cow was to be found in that location. Tell-tale cow-plops continued on for about three blocks, then suddenly stopped, and there wasn’t either a cow or cow barn in sight. Maybe Scotty beamed them up to the Starship Enterprise.
That was the big activity for the day. We thought about wandering around Reutte (where we’d spent no time at all), but decided to go back to the hotel and loaf until dinner.
