Day 28 – We Travel Back Munich

Feb 10, 2024

Today’s Adventure

Cindy and I are back in Virginia and recovering from a wicked case of jet lag. A full month spent six time zones away from home will do that to you! We were on the road for 31 days so it truly was a month in the mountains. There were 26 outing days with two travel days on either end and one transit day in the middle when we moved from Italy to Austria.

I’m an engineer so I used a spreadsheet to track everything (that’s what engineers do). Here’s a quick summary of this adventure :

4 Planes
25 Trains
37 Buses
4 Cable Cars
2 Funiculars
4 Taxis/Shuttles

27 Restaurants (!)

164 Total Miles Walked
68.2 Total Hours Walked
25 Average Minutes Per Mile
30,982 Total Feet Of Vertical

Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet tall. Just sayin’ 🙂

I took a total of 5,769 pictures with my iPhone 15 Pro Max, most of which were not uploaded to Facebook (even if sometimes it seemed that way!)

Our trip home was interesting as always. An all-wheel-drive Sprinter-based shuttle van picked us up at our hotel in Seefeld about 12:45 PM on Saturday for the ride north to Munich International Airport, a.k.a. Flughafen München or MUC. Normally this would have been about a two hour drive, all of it on major highways.

As it turned out there was a major accident on the shortest route north through Garmisch so that wasn’t going to work. And of course there was construction with major delays on the alternate route that would would have taken us through Innsbruck and across the German border at Kufstein. Our flight from MUC to Atlanta wasn’t until the next day, but the other person in the shuttle had a Lufthansa flight to Amsterdam connecting to Buenos Aires booked for 17:30. The heat was on given the potential delay.

Our driver, apparently a World Rally Championship driver wannabe, took us over the river and through the wood on a GPS-enabled network of backroads that gave us a first-hand (if occasionally blurred) look at small town life across much of southern Bavaria. We finally arrived at MUC around 15:45, about an hour late but still marginally in time for our fellow passenger to make his flight.

We stayed Saturday night at the Hilton Munich Airport so that we’d have a nice relaxed start for our 11:00 AM flight on Sunday morning. This hotel is a favorite of ours as it is literally right in between the two main terminals with easy walking access to all airport amenities. It’s clean, modern, and (in an unusual twist for airport hotels) extremely quiet.

We checked in, dropped our bags in the room (two roller duffels, two backpacks, and a ski tube) and walked to the Edeka grocery store located in Terminal 2. We bought two Caesar salads, a couple of large fresh-baked pretzels, and pair of local beers to go. We then enjoyed one last European dinner in our hotel room with my laptop hooked up to the TV so that we could continue our binge watching of downloaded Mad Men episodes.

The next morning we rolled the bags over to Terminal 1 and checked in for our flight home. Because there are no Delta Clubs at MUC we were given access to Airport Lounge World. This third party lounge was very European, including a self-serve open bar with beer, wine, and even hard liquor to pair with your favorite breakfast items. Overall not a bad way to kill an hour or so waiting for our flight to start boarding. It was quite rainy as we left Munich but our 10 hour flight from the land of Lufthansa to the domain of Delta was on time, if a bit bumpy along the way.

Our flight from Atlanta to Richmond was another story as the bad weather that was all over the southeastern US delayed our flight and made for a very rough ride home. Our 757’s airframe was generating an impressive symphony of reasonably alarming sounds as we were rather thoroughly shaken *and* stirred during the first 30 minutes after leaving ATL. After landing (thankfully!) in Richmond we picked up a rent car to drive the final leg home. We arrived back in Williamsburg shortly before midnight, more than ready to fall into bed for a well-earned night’s sleep.

As you probably know Atlanta airport operates parallel runways so it’s not unusual to land with two planes more or less side-by-side on the approach. In our case the companion plane had a special message painted on the side – see the final video. It was a perfectly-timed message for what I need to say to Cindy for all of her hard work researching and planning this latest adventure. I just show up, take pictures, and write the blogs – she’s the one that really makes the trips happen and I am very grateful for everything that she does.

What’s up next for us? All that I can say is stay tuned and find out!

For Innichen’s main page click here.

For Seefeld’s main page click here.

For the entire trip’s main page click here.