Pilgrimage to Munich

It’s really amazing the amount of mess a family of four can create in a hotel room in less than 24 hours.  After packing up all of our stuff back into bags and loading it into Vito, we stopped in for the very extensive buffet breakfast at our hotel.  We had eaten a little bit each of eggs, pastries, ham and cheese when Andy told me he just figured out the price of the breakfast was something like $35 a person.  Suddenly, all of our appetites became huge and we began shoveling all sorts of different types of food into our mouths.  I took the opportunity to try the multivitamin juice that had been offered on the menu the day before.  I would describe the taste as a grainy, vitaminy version of fruit cocktail juice.   Luckily it was only a very small glass of the drink so I didn’t have to spit it out.  We started shoving apples and crackers into our purses and grabbed a second cappuccino to get the most for our money.  My dad would have been proud.

Speaking of small glasses, the size of the drinking receptacles is one of many small differences between how things are done in Europe versus the U.S.   Drinking glasses are tiny compared to back home…like five ounces max.  Rather than receiving a large glass filled mostly with ice, after ordering, most likely you will receive a bottle of whatever you ordered along with several small glasses to be used to share the beverage.  Beer and coffee, of course, are exceptions but juice, water and soda all follow this pattern.

We left the hotel before 8:30am in order to have time to meet up with our friends and make the trek to the Munich train station in time to meet our friend Alexandra who we had sailed with in China and Thailand.

In what seemed like no time at all, we were across the Swiss border and reacquainted with our friends Stefan and Christina.  Stefan was Andy’s family’s exchange student when Andy was in high school and h/we have met up with him and his wife a number of times in various parts of the world since then.

We followed them into the town of Konstanz, Germany, where they had both gone to university and law school.

Konstanz was incredible…the perfect southern German town, untouched by wars due to its proximity to the neutral Switzerland.  The Allies did not bomb the town as they thought it was in Switzerland.  Because of that, the old buildings remain picturesque and pristine despite their age.

Stefan served as our tour guide and told us about the building the pope visited in something like 400 years ago as well as how the statue right on the lake was only added in the 80s as a temporary turned permanent addition drawing attention to how the Roman Catholic clergy and nobility both used prostitutes.

After a brief meander through the town and a spot of cappuccino, we returned to our vehicles and started out on our trip east to Munich.

We bisected Lake Konstanz with a ferry ride on the nicest ferry I have ever seen.  The bathroom was new and clean and even had a changing table. Based on my previous ferry experiences, especially in China, I thought every ferry was ghetto and only a few rides away from being in one of those tragic new stories, so yet another perception was altered.  I love that about travel…almost every assumption and expectation you have has the ability to be turned upside down.

Anna and Andy were both eager to see how Vito would fare on the autobahn whereas I was most interested in how the girls were going to do on the drive.   Vito was able to hold his own but as Anna captured in this video below he had a bit of sports car envy.  Even though he himself is a Mercedes, the fact he is a V-class van makes him unable to hang with his factory-mates.

The girls did well on the drive.  Belén came up with a fear of tunnels of unknown origin so my work as the backset kid entertainer required more creativity than usual.  Did you know that at least sometimes you can clap away all things scary in a tunnel?

We arrived in Munich four hours later, checked into our hotel on the outskirts of town and you guessed it, headed downtown on the train.  It was very nice to have Stefan and Christina with us not only for their company and German language skills but Stefan was a big help navigating our stroller up and down stairs as we changed trains three times on our trek downtown.

Despite leaving on our what should have been four to five hour trek to downtown Munich from Zurich before 9am, we were still a couple of minutes late to our 4:10pm rendezvous with Alexandra at platform 22 of the Haupthbahnhof.  She was waiting there with her luggage as she was only stopping in Munich for an hour to see us.  She had arranged her entire business trip around this one-hour lay-over so we made the most of it, quickly grabbing drinks at a nearby train station café and catching up as quickly as possible.  She has recently been married and seems immensely happy.  It was really so great to spend even a short amount of time with Alexandra before she returned back to her work journey.

Afterwards, we ate at Augustiner, a famous beer house and enjoyed the most fabulous German meal featuring bratwurst, a potato pasta of some sort (not gnocchi) and some sort of Bavarian dumpling and of course beer.  The meal’s climax was an incredible dessert called kaiserschmarren, which was essentially sweetened cooked apple that you dipped in a delectable sauce.  We will definitely be looking the recipe for that one up when we get home.  Even my self-proclaimed “I’m not a dessert guy” husband was drooling over that one.

After dinner, we took the train back to our hotel that was fabulously kid friendly.  They had a large crib prepared in our room that fit Belén perfectly.  We continued to put Eloise in her nest.  That night was a lot more restful than the previous with only one wake up screaming fest from our jet lagged toddler.  It didn’t last long though and we more or less had a decent nights sleep, which we were all in desperate need of.

Tomorrow would be the legendary Oktoberfest…with our children. “Parents of the Year” right here folks.

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Tagged as: Augustiner, Europe with kids, Konstanz, Munich, traveling with kids, tunnels, Zurich