We left by train for Munich on the Monday morning after the birthday garden party. Fortunately M had looked up the trip for us on the internet because we had missed the train we had intended to catch and were very surprised at all the changes that we had to make. That is, we had tickets to Zurich to Munich – and it turns out we had to change trains 5 times to get there. We had absolutely no idea. We could still have been sitting on a train somewhere in Switzerland in a yard or something and may never have been seen again.
Our tickets actually said in small print Zurich, Stuttgart, Munich – the first Swiss train conductor took one look and pretended to clip the ticket or so it seemed – because we were not on the Zurich to Stuttgart train and I guess throwing 2 oldies off the train would not have made his day. We were on the train that we had originally planned to be on – which did not go anywhere near Stuttgart. I will look up the route and add the details of it. That is where an Oldies OE goes awry – one cannot remember all the minute details.
Previously the Amsterdam ticket office had printed out the stops for us to get where we were going – the “lazy” one didn’t do that for us and we could have been sorely embarrassed and lost. And just maybe – because the Dutch do not admit to mistakes – she didn’t print the stops out because she had in fact booked us on the wrong train. Fortunately we hadn’t reserved seats as well.
It was a very interesting trip but bits were quite harrowing. We went to Munich, Rottenburg op de Tauber (a medieval town in all respects except their toilets had reached late 19th century standards and were pretty yuck) and Berlin. We visited the Dachau concentration camp which was the really harrowing one for me. We went there on a tour which did mean we received all sorts of information – but I am a really visual person – and the tour guide led us like lambs into the room where people got undressed to go into the showers – through a narrow door into the shower room and I was out of there so fast. I couldn’t go back because of the crowd so had to go forward through the shower room directly into the crematorium – and then out through the next room (I have no idea of the purpose of that room maybe record keeping).
We also visited the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie as well as the newish Jewish memorial which is a stunning memorial again with a very harrowing journey underground through the stories of the holocaust.
We did drive by Hitler’s bunker area – now a very unassuming car park and walked down the road under the newer Linden trees as Hitler had had the original ancient Linden trees chopped down so he could see his troops march by better – or maybe so they could see him better.
We saw many other wonderful buildings, the Brandenburg gate and more, enjoyed a meal at the original Munich Hofbrauhaus as well as having a meal of pork red cabbage and potatoe in a Munich beer garden. The beer garden was lovely and great fun until an obnoxious American decided to tell us his life story, and how very polite we are – we didn’t tell him to get lost – we just left once we had eaten when he was annoying someone else.
Tags: Berlin, Bike Rides, family, Germany, Munich, Switzerland, train travel
