The Alps Are Green for the Same Reason as New Zealand: Rain. LOTS of it. (Day 6)

Despite having a very quiet motel room – especially compared to Munich, I woke up at 2:00 a.m., 4:30 a.m., 6:00 a.m., and when alarm went off at 7:45. Still raining. I sometimes have weird dreams when I’m on vacation. Maybe it’s a result of being in unfamiliar surroundings, where you tend to lose your frame of reference. Or maybe it has more to do with why you shouldn’t have pizza for dinner.

After showering and getting dressed, we ate breakfast in the hotel dining room as it was included in our hotel rate. Aileen had pressed-grain-and-cinnamon-flake-thingies on top of yogurt, bread with fruit preserves, and coffee. I went WILD again and had puffed wheat cereal with milk, bread with fruit preserves, and coffee. We paid our bill and we headed out at 9:30 a.m.

Aileen’s hip seemed better, but we decided a low activity day would be prudent. Therefore, our plan was to “experiencing the Alps” by car: or, in less florid terms, driving from Reutte to somewhere near Salzburg. If you drove the most direct route via autobahn, it would be about 220 kilometers and a little less than 3 hours. But we decided to drive a more circuitous route through the Alps, along what the Germans call Die Romantische Strasse – the Romantic Road. This is a series of scenic highways, and other roads that would partly retrace some roads and passes that I rode during my 3-day Bavatian motorcycle tour in 1999.

Problem #1: After driving 30 kilometers south in surprisingly heavy traffic, we find that road where we need to make our first turnoff is CLOSED. Hmmm… this is actually quite a problem, as the route we want to take is on the north side of the Alps, and the only way to get there now involves driving quite a bit further south, then east through Innsbruck, then back north again to pick up our route. It will be a 100 km, 2 hour detour – but HEY! WE’RE ON VACATION! WE’VE GOT TIME.

Problem #2: About 15 km further south, traffic slows, slows, slows, and eventually stops - about 300 meters short of a tunnel entrance. No one is going in the tunnel, and no one is coming out. We shut off the engine and wait with everyone else. Five minutes later, a police car goes racing by and heads into the tunnel – subsequently followed by two more police cars, an ambulance, at least three fire trucks, and more police cars. Shortly thereafter, a medevac helicopter lands on the roadway.

Now, we don’t have a way to get through the mountain, either.

More police cars come and start turning people around. Some quick paper map work shows a possible surface route about 3 km east of the tunnel. So us and 5,000 of our closest friends begin a detour through towns that probably haven’t seen this much traffic… since the last time there was an accident in the tunnel. About 60 minutes later, we’re back on detoured track. We celebrated by stretching our legs by a lake visible near Fernpass (the haze in the distance isn’t smog – it’s rain):

As our revised route carried us through Innsbruck, I thought about stopping and visiting the site of yet another Olympic Games… but the pouring rain changed my mind. Roughly 30 km east of Innsbruck, we rejoined our originally intended route of the day – about 85 km longer and an hour and a half later.

The Alps looked, well… WET. And green. It was still raining - sometimes moderately, at other times more heavily - as we drove through Zell am Ziller and the Gerlospass. We stopped at Krimmler Wasserfalle, which is the fifth longest waterfall (by length) in the world. At our stop, a grazing cow appeared. She proceeded to trim the long grass around some rocks, acting as one of the quietest, most efficient Weed Wackers ever:

Her exhaust emissions may still be somewhat noxious, however….

We stopped at an Arabic restaurant in Zell am See for supper around 4:00, with spaghetti for Aileen and tortellini for me. We then drove another 50 km before stopped for night in Lofer, at the Hotel Dax – the exact same hotel I stayed in back in 1999. Their wireless internet connectivity is quite good, and we’re finally able to call home via Skype and let Karen know we’re OK.

Staying in Lofer also puts us in easy striking range for tomorrow’s The Sound of Music tour in Salzburg, about another 60 km northeast. The hills may be alive, but Aileen conked out at 8:15, and I’m signing off at 10:30. Auf wiedersehn for now.

Distance report: 323 km / 202 miles (car), 1 mi (by foot), 203 miles for the day, 4,943 miles so far this trip.

The Good News Is: You Know Exactly What’s Wrong (Day 5)

If I were on my normal school-day schedule, I would have to say that we slept in this morning – but since we’re on vacation, I’d have to say that we were up early at 5:50. It was raining lightly, but since we were driving to the town of Hohenschwangau to visit to Schloss Hohenschwangau and Schloss Neuschwanstein, we wanted to allow plenty of time for contingencies.

We were checked out of the hotel by 7:20, then walked the four blocks back to the Europcar rental office in the Hauptbahnhof. We picked up our rental – a black, four door Seat Ibizi and a Garmin GPS unit – and were on the road by 7:55.

The streets in the older tows in Europe are often laid out in rings and spokes. So even though I had brought four different maps and a road atlas with from home, trying to change from a grid-based navigation method without any clues from the sun is difficult. Therefore, we began by blindly following the Garmin GPS lady’s directions.

It quickly becomes evident that she’s heading us to Hohenschwangau via route A95; this is a shorter way to get there, but we (OK, Gary) wanted to travel the more scenic route of A96. We tried some “creative” detours, and subsequently saw a lot of local burghs just west of Munich while looking for route A96. After 45 minutes without success, I just gave in to Ms. Garmin, christening her “Our Lady of Perpetual Navigation” (or OLoPN, for short).

She got us back on the A95 autobahn quickly. There are no speed limits on this part of the autobahn, but in a foreign country, in rain, and in an unfamiliar vehicle, 120 km/h (kilometers per hour, or roughly 75 MPH) seemed fast enough.

We arrived in the town of Hohenschwangau at 10:50 a.m. We found the ticket office where we could purchase the tickets we reserved by E-mail the previous day. If you did not have reserved tickets, the line was something like that for a popular roller coaster at Great America; with reservations, however, we stepped right up and got our tickets. We fortified ourselves with two caffe au laits and two brezels (pretzels), then set off on the 15 minute mildly uphill walk to Schloss Hohenschwangau.

The castle was originally the home of Maximilian, the King of Bavaria, from 1832 to1836. No photos were allowed inside the castle, so we were limited to exterior scenes. They had a tree-form flowering shrub with deep blue-violet flowers, included here for Master Gardener identification:

The tour of Schloss Hohenschwangau was done at 1:20. We then started walking toward Schloss Neuschwanstein (seen in the distance from Schloss Hohenschwangau in the following photo) for our 2:20 tour.

We stopped for a snack of cookies and water or Coke at the base of the climb (see if you can match Aileen and Gary with the correct beverage).The VERY uphill walk to Schloss Neuschwanstein was estimated at 30 to 45 minutes, but us overachievers made it in 22 minutes.

Construction on Schloss Neuschwanstein was started in 1882 by the popular-but-eccentric King Ludwig II. He loved building castles, and almost bankrupted the monarchy in the process. The original design sketches for the castle were done by a theater artist, not an architect. In retrospect, this seems appropriate, as Walt Disney later used Neuschwanstein as one of his inspirations for Cinderella’s Castle. King Ludwig II died in 1886 at age 42, before his castle was finished. The castle is covered by tarps this year for some restoration work, which kills some of the exterior views:

We walked back down the hill, retrieved our car, and headed to the town of Fussen for fuel ($1.639 per liter, about $7.75 US per gallon) and an Austrian autobahnvignette – a tax stamp that lets you drive on the autobahns in Austria, as opposed to having to pay tolls on them. It was then onto the town of Reutte, Austria and the Hotel Goldene-Rose for the night after two pizzas for dinner.

Aileen says her hip flexor is unusually sore after today’s sojourn. It must hurt a lot for her to walk, as it makes me hurt just to watch her. She did some stretches and took a hot shower, and went to bed at 8:30, which is early even for her. I’m finishing this up at 10:30 to the sound of rain on the roof. Tomorrow: off toward Salzburg - see ya’ then.

Distance report: 156 km / 94 miles (car), 3 miles (by foot), 97 miles for the day, 4,740 miles so far this trip

Getting Religion (Day 4)

We awoke to the alarm at 7:45 a.m. and the sound of traffic on wet streets. It was a light rain, and looked like it might not last for the entire day. We got ready, loaded up the backpack with the day’s supplies, and headed out just before 9:30 a.m.

Our first stop was the grocery store across the street for some “emergency” rations, in case we (Gary) got so involved in sightseeing that we (Aileen) were going too long between meals. We bought 2 apples, a bag of dried cranberries, a 0.5 liter bottle of Vanilla Coke (still available in Germany!), and a box of sugar cookies. It was then up one block and around the corner to Back Werk (Bakery Works) for zwei milchkaffes und zwei Johannesbeere kuchen for breakfast.

The rain had abated by this time, so as we were properly nourished and caffeinated, we started walking toward the Royal Section of Munich, as die Residenz (The Royal Palace) was our main destination. As we walked along Marienplatz (Mary’s Plaza), we decided to stop at Michaelskirche (St. Michael’s Church).

Construction of this still actively used Jesuit church was begun in 1576. While still under construction in 1583, its main tower collapsed. The patron funding the church’s construction took this as a sign that the church wasn’t big enough (the Lord works in mysterious ways, I guess), so he eliminated the tower and enlarged the church. As a result, the barrel vaulted ceiling is second in size only to St, Peter’s in Rome. King Ludwig II (castle builder extraordinaire, as we hope to see tomorrow) is buried in a vault beneath the church.

When we exited the church, a strong wind had come up, and the city was drying out quickly. Our walk then took us past die Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady). Construction of this church began in 1468, and was completed in 1488 – a record pace at the time. It has twin “onion dome” cupolas atop its towers that are more reminiscent of Greek Orthodox churches, although you’ll have to take my word on this as we forgot to take a picture of the exterior.

But from this interior picture, you can see how much narrower the ceiling vaulting is compared to Michaelskirche. The church sustained heavy damage during bombing raids in 1944-45, but still contains a number of marvelous stained glass windows:

I’m not certain if these windows survived the bombings, if they were removed for safekeeping and reinstalled after the war, or if they are replicas of the original windows – but they are still quite magnificent. The same uncertainty surrounds the church’s massive pipe organ:

We finally completed our walk to die Residenz und die Schatzkammer (Treasury). The original Palace was built in 1363, but as the Bavarian monarch grew, so did the Palace. Much of the complex was destroyed by fires in 1674 and 1750, but it was generally rebuilt more opulently than before. As a result, the Palace had more than 22,000 sq. meters under roof when the monarchy fell in 1918. World War II was not kind to the Royal Palace either; by the end of the war, less that 50 sq. meters were undamaged.

The subsequent reconstruction took decades, but was certainly completed by craftsmen, as the following picture of the Antiquarium shows:

The Antiquarium houses Duke Albrecht the Fifth’s collection of statuary and busts from before the 1500’s.

Our passes also included seeing die Schatzkammer (the Treasury), which is the collection of valuables gathered by the royal families over the years. It seems that since you had to be important to own valuable things, the more valuable things you owned, the more important you must be – a sort of circular logic that worked to keep various groups from attacking one another. The following is a crucifix from 1598 that supposedly includes relics from the crucifixion of Christ: a fragment of the cross, a piece of the wine-soaked sponge, and others:

By the end of the Treasury tour, we had been walking for about six hours, so we sat in one of the courtyards and at our snacks. We also noticed that the sugar cookies we had purchased that morning are sort of sugar cookies “lite”; they just don’t have as much sugar loaded into them as they do back in the U.S. This is probably a contributing factor to why you just don’t see as many overweight Europeans as you do overweight Americans back home.

We had to make our reservations for our Neuschwanstein castle tour before 5:00 p.m., so we walked back to our hotel. We requested a 12:00 noon tour time, and within a few minutes had our reservation confirmed for a 12:25 tour. I hope we make it on time; everyone says to allow two hours travel time. We still didn’t have any luck calling home via Skype (receive OK, transmit dead), so we walked back downtown to the Augustiner beer garden for dinner.

I asked the waiter for “Ein speisekarte im Englishe, bitte?” (a menu in English, please), and he responded in perfect English: “Would you like one in English, American, or Canadian?” It turns out he was a Canadian who moved to New York for 22 years before emigrating to Munich. He spoke fluent English, German, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian. When we ordered, we had beef goulash (me), half a fried chicken (Aileen), and two dark beers (us). We shared a table with an older, native Munich architect who has relatives who emigrated to Buffalo, New York in 1848; he seemed happy to be able to practice his English.

Back to the hotel, and I fell asleep while Aileen checked her E-mail – so it was lights out for both of us at 9:45 p.m. Tomorrow, we pick up our rental car and head for the Schloss Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein castles. It should be interesting – stay tuned!

Distance traveled: 4 miles (rail), 8 miles (foot), 12 miles for the day, 4,643 miles so far this trip.

The Hills Are Alive, With the Sound of… Rain (Day 7)

Up with the alarm at 7:30 to, yup, light rain. We showered, dressed, and went down to the breakfast included in our stay. As usual, corn flakes and a croissant for me, muesli on top of yogurt and a croissant for Aileen. Add in one cup of coffee each, and we’re on the road by 10:00 a.m. We stopped to fuel up at a BP enroute; fuel is less expensive in Austria than Germany by about 17 cents (Euro) per liter – that’s about 80 cents (US) per gallon cheaper, so it’s worthwhile even at $6.81 per gallon. Thanks goodness our rental gets about 33 miles per gallon.

Our Lady of Perpetual Navigation (my name for the lady inside our rented Garmin GPS unit) guided us to the front door of our hotel flawlessly, and we arrived around 11:30. We  could leave the car parked right in front of the Hotel Mercure Salzburg Kapuziner for free, or pay $11 to park in the garage; our first real no brainer of the trip. But we couldn’t check-in until 3:00 p.m., so we loaded up the backpack and started walking toward the city center.

Our hotel was just off the edge of our map, and it was raining, which made celestial navigation impossible. We made a few false starts, then picked up a more detailed map of the city in a hotel lobby – this made walking to any destination a lot easier.

Our first stop was St. Sebastian’s Church. Even though Mass was at 9:30 a.m. and it was after noon when we arrived, the air was still quite clouded with a fog of incense – enough that Aileen had to leave before she got a headache. The church, which dates back to the late 16^th century, is small and quaint – but the graveyard attached to the church is what provides its notoriety:

This graveyard served as the inspiration for where the vonTrapp family hides during their escape from Salzburg in The Sound of Music (TSoM). Crypts of many families occupy the four sides of the graveyard, and the center of the courtyard contains graves dating back to the 1600’s (including Mozart’s mother). Compared to American headstones,the face of these stones tend to contain a poem or other verse (of significance to the deceased, I would suppose), while the names and dates of those buried in the family plot are carved into the sides of the stones.

After buying an umbrella for me (it would be a hit with any music director, as it is adorned with musical notes - although I selected it because it was the cheapest functional umbrella I could find), we walked across the Salzach River to the Nonnberg Convent. The nunnery was founded around the year 700(!), and the current convent was finished in 1423. The Convent Church is a relative newcomer, built in 1464 through 1506. It was VERY dark in the church; the following photo shows much more detail than what my eyes were able to capture at the time:

Again, the convent is famous from TSoM, as it not only served as the basis for the convent in the movie; it’s where the real Maria vonTrapp studied. And if that hadn’t happened, Julie Andrews’ career would have peaked with Mary Poppins….

And in the following picture, can’t you see the vonTrapp children asking if they could please speak to Fraulein Maria after she returns to the convent?

OK; how about if you remove the trash can and recycling bin just to the left of the gate, and the Honda Nighthawk motorcycle parked across the path – can you visualize it better then?

We walked on to der Alt Stadt (old city), and tried to get into the Dom (Salzburg Cathedral, the current building dating back to the 1700’s) and the Festspielhaus (Festival Hall, which was where the vonTrapp family gave their final concert), but both were closed getting ready for the Salzburg Music Festival. The Festival starts a two-week run on the 20^th, and I’m glad we missed the congestion that accompanies it!

The clouds were beginning to break up, so we found a small café, and eased our disappointment (and our feet) with Apfelstrudel, Milchraumstrudel mit vanillin sauce, and two Cokes. I’ve had apple strudel before, but milchraumstrudel is something I plan to Google and try baking once I get home. It’s a type of airy, cake textured cheesecake with thick, warm vanilla sauce that combines three of my basic food groups (dairy, grain, and sugar) into something amazing.

Our final tourist stop of the day was at the Mirabell Gardens, site of the Mirabell Fountain used as the setting for “Do Re Mi” in, yes, that movie. Aileen spotted one really weird plant in the garden, so I’m including it for all of the Master Gardeners following this blog:

We walked back to our hotel, arriving around 4:30, and checked in. Aileen studied for about an hour and a half for the P.T. Board exam she’ll be taking on July 31^st. It also turns out that there’s a Mickey D’s restaurant on the same street as our hotel, so we took that as a sign. We dined on a New York Classic and Hamburger Royal TS – variations on a well-known theme. We were back at the hotel by 7:30, and watched some TV before Aileen crashed at 8:50. It’s now 10:20, and I’ll be in bed around 11.

Tomorrow, we have a three and a half hour drive to Vienna, although we may stop enroute at Mondsee and see where Maria marries der Kapitan in you-know-what.

Finally, two other facts that I didn’t know about The Sound of Music: (1) When Georg looks up at the mountains in Salzburg and says that they’re going to walk to freedom in Switzerland, there’s a problem: Switzerland is actually over 100 miles away from Salzburg, so you really can’t see the Swiss Alps. (2) It really doesn’t matter that they couldn’t see the Switzerland, because one of the other Sound of Music sites that you can visit is the train station where Maria , Georg, and the brood actually got on the passenger train that they rode to freedom. But I can also see why Hollywood chose the hiking option…. Guten nacht.

Distance report: 53 km (car), 9 km (by foot), 39 miles for the day, TBD miles so far this trip.

A Different View of the World (Day 3)

Our hotel in Munich is among the majority in that it doesn’t have air conditioning; the hotels seem to not have it and not need it. So we slept with our window open and quite a bit of street noise until it really quiets down - sometime after midnight. Sudden, loud sounds wake me up, but I fall back asleep pretty quickly. Aileen wears ear plugs, so the outdoor sounds (and my alleged snoring) don’t bother her.

We were both awake before the alarm at 7:30 local time, with sunny skies and the temperature in the upper 60’s. We got up, dressed, packed my backpack with what we thought we’d need for the day, and left the hotel around 9:00. We headed toward the S-Bahn station to catch an S2 train toward the Concentration Camp at Dachau, although we stopped at Muller’s Coffee Shop for zwei milchkaffes, ein mohrbeere kuchen, und ein Johannesbeere kuchen (two coffees with milk, one blackberry Danish (for Aileen), and one red currant Danish (for me)).

We found the right train, headed the right direction, and arrived at the S-Bahn station in Dachau around 10:15. We got on the connecting bus to the Concentration Camp memorial as it was waiting, and we weren’t sure how far it was to the Camp (it turned out to be ~3 km away, so it was a good call to take the bus). We arrived around 10:30, rented two headsets that provide an audio guide to the site, and started walking. Note: the Fraulein distributing the audio headsets spoke at least five languages fluently; in the U.S., I would have expected her to be working as some sort of translator for Bosch, GE, or some other multi-national conglomerate. Here, she passes out audio headsets all day….

The Camp dates back to 1933; shortly after assuming power, Hitler had the camp built to serve as a detention / “reeducation” center for enemies of the state – which included just about anyone that the SS had a grudge against. The part of the site where the prisoners were held occupies an area about 5 city blocks by 8 city blocks, or about 400 acres. (This is probably only 10% of the total area of the site; the rest was used primarily for SS housing and training.)

You enter the Concentration Camp area through the same Entrance Gate (Jourhaus) used by the prisoners; the gate retains the “Arbeit Macht Frei: wording that would later be copied and used at other Concentration and Death Camps.

To your right is the building that served as the Maintenance Building; new arrivals were processed through here, meals were prepared here, and the showers were also in this building. Built in 1937-38 by the prisoners themselves, this building currently houses the museum for the Memorial.

To your left are two reconstructed barracks, plus the original footings of the other 32 barracks. (All of the original barracks were torn down sometime after 1945; it was unclear if this was done by the Americans or the Germans.) This first photo shows one of the two barracks; it measures 10 meters by 100 meters:

This second photo shows the view from the opposite corner of the camp; the barracks in the first photo is at the far distant corner of the site:

The 34 barracks were designed to hold 6,000 prisoners. By 1939, the camp population was close to 20,000, and when the U.S. Army came to liberate the camp on April 29, 1945, there were over 45,000 prisoners in the camp – only because in late 1944, the Germans began worrying that the camp would soon be liberated and they would lose some of their slave labor, so they marched 16,000 camp prisoners to the Alps,with over half of the prisoners not surviving the trip. This means that at its height, nearly 63,000 prisoners – one-third of the population of Aurora - were held in a facility of less than 40 square city blocks.

The museum provides great details about the economic and political conditions that led up to the rise of the Third Reich: how the price of one egg rose from 0.08 marks in early 1933 to over 80 billion marks by late 1934; many people were unemployed; and people were looking for a way out of the disaster caused by unsupportable reparations payments after the end of the first World War. It also provides information about the incomprehensible atrocities of the SS; I’m somewhat sorry to admit that it just becomes sort of mind-numbing after a couple of hours.

Suffice it to say that it was a VERY moving experience. It also provided a lot of background information leading up to the events of World War II – not trying to justify any of the atrocities, but trying to explain how events happened.

We returned our headsets, ate two apples that we purchased at a market before leaving Munich that morning, and caught the bus / S-Bahn, arriving back at City Center around 3:45 p.m. – so, what the heck, we’re only moderately tired and there’s still daylight left – so let’s head out to Olympic Park – site of the 1972 Summer Games!

We made it to the site by around 4:15, and walked toward the main facilities: the Olympic Pool (in use today as an AWESOME health club facility), the main indoor arena (under construction & locked), and the outdoor stadium (also locked as they were setting up for some type of sport automobile show). So we climbed Olympic Hill just south of the park to get an overall view of the Olympic Park (and BMW World Headquarters, just to the right of the Olympic Tower):

Now we were really tired – and hungry – so we rode the U3 train back to Marienplatz, and stopped at one of the first restaurants we saw for Italian food. Aileen had Spaghetti Bolognese, while I want *completely* wild and had… Penne Bolognese. We were both quite thirsty, and worried that any “local beverages” would result in pounding headaches, so we had two Cokes. (You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t….)

We walked with diminishing vigor back to the hotel. Aileen had lights out by around 9:30, while I stayed up another 2 hours checking E-mail and trying to get my Skype connection to work. I can place calls and hear Karen clearly – but she can’t hear me. We may just have to “go back” to communicating by E-mail; ah the good old days. And now it’s lights out for me at 11:35; see you tomorrow.

Distance traveled: 24 miles (rail), 8 miles (foot), 32 miles for the day, 4,631 miles so far this trip.

Around The World in 356 Days (Days 1 and 2)

Last year at this time, I was literally on the opposite side of the earth: New Zealand is about 172 degrees east longitude, and this year the blog begins from Munich, at 12 degrees east longitude. Boy, how much difference a year can make….

Those of you who know me may remember that I was planning to take a trip “overseas” this summer with Aileen, my youngest daughter. She graduated from University of Illinois – Chicago this year with her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree and is planning to relocate around the beginning of August to San Diego. She’s always wanted to go “overseas”, and this may be the last time our schedules permit it.

We talked (for quite some time) about going to either Scotland or Germany & Austria, and finally decided on Germany / Austria - because ever since I was a kid, a Hoyne family vacation involved going to see mountains (thanks, Ed). And there are a lot more mountains in southern Germany and Austria than in Scotland, Ben Nevis included (Google “Ben Nevis” if you need to).

I booked our flights using frequent flier miles on United, which meant that we had to connect through London enroute to Munich. And after my memorable-but-unpleasant experience with missed connections flying to New Zealand last year, I made sure to leave enough time to have some “wiggle room” in London if our inbound flight leg from O’Hare was delayed for any reason.

The departure was supposed to be at 3:50 p.m. on Monday, July 9^th. So we closed the doors and pushed back from the gate at… 3:43 p.m., 7 minutes ahead of schedule. The flight took a more southerly route than what I was expecting (we flew over Newfoundland instead of Labrador and the southern tip of Greenland), and we arrived at Heathrow at 5:40 a.m., instead of our scheduled 5:55 a.m. arrival time. By 6:15, we had walked about ¾ mile through the International Terminal, and were in the main lobby waiting for our 9:35 a.m. departure to Munich.

OK; I admit that leaving a 3 hour and 40 minute cushion sounded like a good idea at the time, but when you’re actually sitting in a foreign airport for nearly four hours with nothing to do, it’s a little boring. So we bought a snack (guess which one of us bought a cup of yogurt, while the other one bought THE national candy bar of England (Kit-Kat)), and waited… and waited… and waited. Finally it was time to go, so we started walking to the gate for the Munich leg of our flight – but took the following picture just to prove that we really were in London:

(Excuse the lousy framing of the photo; it’s my first-ever arm’s length self portrait.)

Our connecting flight on Lufthansa was about 15 minutes late pushing back from the gate (so much for Teutonic punctuality), but we arrived in Munich 3 minutes ahead of our 12:25 schedule anyway (Herr Flight Engineer: I don’t care how much fuel ve have to burn to arrive on time; ve VILL arrive on time. Flight Engineer: Jawohl, Herr Kapitan!). We cleared Customs, grabbed our luggage, a 3 days – all regions U-Bahn / S-Bahn pass, and the S8 train to Munich Haupbahnhopf. We checked into the Hotel Schweis just after 2:00 p.m. local time, which was 7:00 a.m. back home, and… took a nap.

Slightly refreshed, we headed into Alt Munich for dinner and wound up at the Hofbrauhouse.

(Note that the picture that I’ve included does NOT show either Aileen or me sampling the tasty adult beverages served here; this is intentional….) We dined on a basket of bread (two pretzels, one roll, and a piece of dark bread – all of which were tasty) and a plate of three types of sausages (bratwurst, two hot dog equivalents, and one slightly whiter but more spicy than the hot dog equivalents. The sausages were served over a plate of sauerkraut, which I don’t normally like – but this was a lot less sour than what comes in a Frank’s can at the Blue Goose.

We walked back through the surprisingly busy Marienplatz (Saint Charles is NEVER that busy on a Tuesday night at 9:30), and are going to sleep early as we hope to have a busy day tomorrow visiting Dachau Concentration Camp and perhaps the site of the 1972 Olympic Games. Guten Nacht, y’all.

Distance traveled: 4,539 miles (air), 40 miles (car – to O’Hare), 17 miles (rail), 3 miles (foot), or 4,599 miles for the day.