Here We Go!: Summer 2018, Days 1&2

June 16 & 17

Our vacation this year has Romania as our final destination, but we will be visiting some of our old favorites along the way.  First is a day in Munich, then by train for a few days each in Venice, Vienna, and Budapest.  Then we arrive in Romania, getting a car on our third day for a week, before flying home via Stockholm.

We were planning to leave Minneapolis Saturday night and we received a text from Iceland Air in the late morning that, due to overbooking, our seat assignments had been changed.  Well, they had been changed to a different airplane in a different airline, in a different terminal!  Same time, though.  We were put on a Delta flight and instead of a layover in Reykjavik, our layover was in Amsterdam, still landing in Munich.  Not a problem!  Delta serves food and has better movies than Iceland Air, so we were happy!   In my experience, Delta is only behind Qantas in the airline experience for those of us in steerage class.

On our flight, we were first given a snack, then a hot meal, then a breakfast, with bottles of water offered throughout the night!  And tons of good movies, so the flight went by quickly.  Then we walked off our flight in Amsterdam, went through EU customs, then joined the line to get on our connecting flight.  Joshua and I weren't able to sleep,  so we were a bit tired!

We arrived in Munich around noon.  We took the train from the airport and found lockers at the train station for our luggage until our night train to Venice.  Then we set out on the city.  We ended up just walking the city in the hot, humid weather.  There were many festivals going on all over with booths selling crafts and such, street performers, and live music stages in each plaza.  Despite Joshua being nonreligious, he loves cathedrals and we visit a lot of them.  He likes the architecture and the grandiosity of them.  He is in awe of humans creating such beauty and feels inspired.  Beware:  I have A LOT of photos!  (If you don't want to look at them, you can just scroll down to read more about our first two days.)

St. Michael Kirche

Look at that uniformity--Germans in action!

Singer and accordian player

Public art?

Glockenspiel tower

Hofbrauhaus in the background

A choir singing American 80s tunes

Randy was focusing on taking photos, so Joshua and I had a little adventure investigating things!

Munchen Dom

Around 7:00 we stopped for dinner and ate outside and we could see the glockenspiel from our table.  That is until about 5 minutes after we received our food and it started to rain!  We moved our food under an umbrella and the hot, humid day suddenly became quite cool.  After dinner, we went to the train station to wait for our 11:30 train.  Everywhere else was wet and cold.

A group singing a wide variety of American songs--and
one of them played the saxophone for some of the songs.

An old wall

This is one of the bike paths.  They are on the sidewalks because the sidewalks are so wide.  they are raised up from the road by a few inches tall curb.

In a shopping "mall"--vines hanging from the ceiling.

The train station was cold too, being open to the elements, but it wasn't raining on us.  Joshua fell asleep on a bench and Randy and I took turns walking around and looking for a water fountain to fill our water bottles.  The only water available was in the pay-to-use bathrooms.  Eventually, Randy paid to use the bathroom and fill our water bottles.  Then he got our bags from the lockers and went to find out which track our train would  be in so that we could go there to wait.  From the woman at the desk, he found that our train time had been changed to 10:30.  We had 15 minutes until it left!  He came to get Joshua and I and we rushed with our baggage to the correct track, found our car and arrived at our couchette with only about 5 minutes to spare.  A couchette has benches in the day and the benches are moved to provide 4-6 berths to sleep.  Being a night train, the berths had already been converted and the porter had put sheet sacks, blankets and pillows on the already.  We were in a 4-berth and the 4th already had someone in it (we had  reserved three for the three of us).  

We were exhausted and prepared for bed right away, but due to the noises of a train, the lights of the passageway outside our couchette, and the loud family in the couchette next to us, we didn't get much sleep.  We had purchased rolls and orange juice for our breakfast, but our porter told us that we would be served breakfast and took our drink requests (coffee, tea, hot chocolate).  It turned out to be two large rolls for each of us with butter and jam to put on them.  We each ate our roll and drank our orange juice as well.  Then we arrived in Venice about an hour and a half late which was fine because we couldn't drop off our bags for another hour.  We arrived at our rental and called the owner who agreed to let us leave our bags earlier even though the cleaning person hadn't been there yet.  We received the tour of our apartment and the keys and were out walking Venice before noon had arrived.  Very hot, very humid!