Day 3

Day 3

Woke the next day at 7:30am feeling greatly refreshed, went downstairs to the complimentary breakfast and this is when it hit me, we were indeed in the land of MEAT and CHEESE. The Uhland has a great spread, consisting of all sorts of meats, cheeses, breads, cereals, juices and of course soft and hard boiled eggs. I had never really had such a hearty breakfast, but it was great and after basically missing dinner the night before it hit the spot.

BTW I highly recommend the Hotel Uhland for anyone who wants to stay in a very clean and friendly place, the hotel staff is great, they even called the airline for us and spoke german to get our luggage expedited. This hotel is not in the heart of the city, but very close to two different UBahn stops that go to the city center in just a few stops.

Once done with breakfast we headed out to the UBahn and to the Marienplatz. Getting to the Ubahn was super easy, the ticket machine was somewhat hard to figure out, lots of choices and even once I figured out the correct choice I did not realize that I needed to select the choice prior to putting the euro’s in, not after. Trial and error is a great thing and eventually we figured it out. Stamped the ticket at the entrance and proceeded…. The curious thing about the Ubahn is that there is no one really checking tickets and there are no gates or turnstiles or anything, it is almost all on the honor system, or at least it seemed that way…. The Ubahn itself was very clean and easy to figure out, another curiosity that we noticed is upon entering the Ubahn it was almost completely full with people, but you could literally hear a pin drop. Everyone was amazingly quiet, almost eerily so, this was definelty a trend and seems to be a cultural thing, at least in Germany. I for one really liked it, people were still very friendly but were respectful of other people’s space and such.

Exited the Ubahn and went up to the Marienplatz, this was really cool. The actual square is amazing and then almost every side street had a ton of shops and restaurants including open air fruit and vegetable stands that were filled with amazing fruit (we partook in the raspberries and apples). We went into a ton of shops, wandering thru the streets with no real destination in mind other than taking in the city and picking up a few gifts along the way.

We happened by the Hofbrau Haus down one of the side streets and decided to do lunch here since I had read so much about it on the Fest. It was a bit after normal lunch hours so the restaurant was pretty empty, we sat down and had a few glasses of the regular beer and ate a great meal. I had the roasted pork knuckle, not usually a fan of such meals, but this was really great. The kids shared half a chicken, which was also very tasty. Once done we went down to the gift shop and picked up a few trinkets, it was really a fun meal and a good time for our limited days in Munich.

Went back to shopping and purusing the rest of the area, very soon the munchkins began to grow weary of our foot travels and we picked up some quick sweet treats at a great bakery and headed back to the Ubahn and our hotel. Again, it was easy to navigate to the appropriate train and we were back to our hotel in 20 minutes or so after a quick walk.

Took a quick break in the room and then tried to figure out what to do with our last evening in Munich, since walking was more or less out, we decided to take a late trip to the Neuschwanstein castle. Headed down to the 335, plugged in the destination in the nav system and we were off. I gotta say the nav system was great, we were in rush hour traffic in Munich and never missed a turn or exit, there is no way I would have been able to do that without the nav.

The trip to the castle was very nice once we were out of the city limits, the road was one lane each way for the most part and had a few areas of unlimited speed, but the road was pretty curvy and the unlimited speed zones only lasted a short distance. One note of interest, at least something that surprised me was how often the speed limit changes here. I mean literally it will go from unlimited speed to 120km to 100km to 80 km in a distance of a 1000 meters and then all of the sudden it will be unlimited speed and then back to 100km and so on. It was really interesting and the one thing I noted was the limit, whatever it was, was almost never paid attention to by the locals, or at least by most of them…. The only area that these were really heeded were in the construction areas, which you pretty much had to go slow in due to the road conditions.

Got to the castle, it was pretty late, so most things were closed. We were able to drive almost all the way to the lower castle, but really just stayed in the car and saw both from afar. It was a very spectacular area. After a bit of gazing we headed back, stopped off at the local grocery store where I proved a valuable point, that bier is in fact cheaper than water, picked up 6 pints of fine Bavarian bier and headed back to Munich. The trip back was a bit hairy, in the dark with a new car on some pretty twisty roads, made it back around 8:30pm, again we were all so tired we skipped dinner and had some snacks, yes this means we are leaving Germany tomorrow having never eaten dinner here, but still having very full belly’s at all times.