Munich

Another good day. We woke up in the morning and packed the car to head out of Stuttgart at about 10 AM for our drive to Munich. The drive was relatively uneventful except for the fact I set a personal speed record on the autobahn, hitting 210 km/h at one stretch. I’ll save you the conversion – that’s a bit over 130 mph.

We arrived at our Airbnb accommodations in Munich – a beautiful house in a residential neighborhood. The hosts were out but had left us a nice note on the kitchen table. We brought our bags in, rested for a bit and headed out to the Marienplats area about 12:30 PM. We found a parking space (max of 2 hours) near the platz and set out First stop was the Augustiner Bierhalle, a traditional old-style beer hall where I had beer and shared a half-chicken and an assorted cheese plate for lunch. It was great stuff, but a lot of food. I’m relatively surprised how inexpensive the food is here. The entrees were about 9-10 euros each. Lunch for the two of us was about 35 euros in most places. And, we could have comfortably managed with only the chicken. We then headed out to Marienplatz and did a little chocolate shopping and wandered into the St. Michael’s Church and gazed at the glockenspiel. Since a couple of hours had passed, we went back to the car and added another 2 hours of parking and walked to the Hofbrauhaus, stopping briefly at the Munich Frauenkirche and Victualienmarkt on the way. Another Hofbrau Dunkel and a massive pretzel lasted long enough for us to miss the glockenspiel demo at 5. We made it back to the car just about when we ran out of time.

We drove back to the hosts and spent a delightful evening on their terrace chatting and enjoying a couple more local brews before heading to a nearby Indian restaurant for dinner. Dinner at the Lal Qila was uninspiring. We probably shouldn’t have ordered the unfamiliar Fish Chili, but it was a sweet-and-sour fish recipe that wasn’t terrible, but nothing that got either Sheila or I excited about the place. The samosas and gulab jamun were at best serviceable. But, it really wasn’t bad, just nothing great.

We walked back to the home, chatted briefly with the hosts and came up to bed. We requested and got a fan for the room (YAY!) Plus, some light rain had dramatically cooled down the place, so it should be a relatively comfortable night. I lay in bed for a few minutes and promptly fell asleep. Woke up a bit before midnight to change, brush my teeth, and write this blog update.

Tomorrow, we head to Salzburg.