Munich, Germany 2024

Sat, Sun, Mon (March 9-11, 2024)

Good morning. Good evening.  Whatever time it is!  It's 9:30 am Iowa time, 3:30pm Germany time.  We landed in Munich about 7am, and had hoped to sleep most of the airplane ride, but it was really hit or miss with sleep.  I was squeezed between Calvin and David in the middle seat. :D

We left Saturday the 9th for Chicago to stay in a hotel before our Sunday morning Noon flight from Chicago to Charlotte, then the flight from Charlotte to Munich left at 5:55pm Charlotte time and landed 7am-ish in Germany.

After checking in, I fell asleep, Dave got power converters, 3 of the 4 kids slept...I woke up and realized it would be good to blog!

on a bus I think on the way from the hotel the airport in Chicago

our Munich hotel

I don't know the plans for the rest of the day.  I am about to take a shower and then we'll figure out our next meal.  

We searched for restaurants near us, and found an Italian place within walking distance.  I think we got there at 5:45pm. Walking there was full of comedy and confusion about where the bike path was compared to the walking path.  Biking is a big deal around here, I think we were that dumb American family getting in the way of most bikers!  We got a table and sat down - the staff spoke English and that was very nice.  We all shared an appetizer and each got a pasta dish - it was so delicious.

This waiter was making jokes with Calvin the whole night and making him laugh.

We meandered through the area where our hotel is and found a pharmacy to look for a certain eye drop that Martha and Aunt Laura were looking for.  I didn't see it, so I'll check another pharmacy.  

Violet and Dave were falling asleep on our way back to the hotel and the boys wanted to swim, so I took them down to the pool.  

Tues, March 12, 2024

It is helpful to see my clock in the corner of the screen to remind me what time it is in Iowa.  I woke up at 12:30am and a hard time going back to sleep, so I took melatonin and eventually got back to sleep.

Calvin and Eli apparently woke up at 3:30 am.  The kids have a separate room a couple doors down from us on floor 20, so we don't exactly know what's going on in their room at all times. The boys told me they were staaarving (lol) so I took them down to breakfast myself, and then Dave took the girls after.  Currently we are "getting ready" - half of us are showered.

This is our view out the hotel room window! It is south-facing, and far to the right are the mountains of Austria.

 

Once we were all ready, we got an Uber to the main city center and entered the Marienplatz (main city plaza, stands for Mary's plaza).  We watched the Glockenspiel figurines do their little dance in the clock tower at Noon.  The first dance signified an important wedding in history (founder of Hofbrehaus), and the second was a cooper's dance that signified the end of the plague, which was meant to encourage people to come out of their houses.  

The little dances took about 5 minutes total. I took a video if anybody is interested.  

had to stop for a little pick up 

the circled area is a pharmacy where I located some EvoTears - a special eye drop manufactured in Germany and is only $20 per bottle and was a special request from Laura and Martha.  They each got 5 bottles so I picked up 10 of them.  Apparently it is multiples of that cost in the USA.

We climbed up a nearby tower called St. Peter's Tower in the cathedral and got some great views from up there!

This says "The ascent of the tower offers a wonderful panorama"

Stunning view of Marienplatz and the Frauenkirche (cathedral with twin towers, oldest/biggest in town). 

When we exited the tower at St. Peter's cathedral, we entered the inside of the building and walked around.  

showing the damage from WW2 and the restoration efforts

We got cheesy pretzels, a donut, and bottled water at this place.

Between the St. Peter's tower climb and visiting Frauenkirche, there were shops to stop in.  The girls were excited about clothing stores and beauty products, and the boys went in the Lego Store.

"Violet cream"

Lego store in Munich

Lego version of this!  Very cute!

Frauenkirche - the two towers construction ended in 1525.  The church construction started in 1468.

"Devil's Foot" right at the entrance.  Google the legend behind this one!

Interior of Frauenkirche. This place also suffered major damage after WW2 and was restored and finished in 1994.

organ pipes in the back

incredibly high stained glass windows

After leaving Frauenkirche, we had quite an adventure going to a W.C.  We had to go to an ATM and break the euros by buying snacks and then use the .6 euros to enter the bathrooms.  Violet describes this as the funniest and most chaotic moment of the day!

We got an Uber back to the hotel.  David ordered pizza for the kids and we have the Enlightened Style (Custom Brands Group...one of our top vendors) welcome dinner at Hofbräuhaus tonight.  

multiple buses got approx 400 people here

This is John McKenzie, he's the owner of the three Des Moines territories north of our two DSM territories

"When in Rome"....when in Munich, try the beer

these trumpet players were amazing!

Violet, Calvin, Vanessa and Eli ate pizza we ordered for the via UberEats, went swimming, and headed to bed around 10pm.  I got one text from Violet at one point after they went swimming that they were locked out of their hotel room, so I guess they figured it out and asked the front desk for a new key. Since they didn't have any ID on them, the hotel staff followed them to their room and asked Calvin for his ID before giving up the key.  I was impressed by that!

David and I got a bus ride back (transportation provided by CBG), and hung out in the hotel lobby for a bit and talked with some other BB owners.  We were pretty tired so we went to bed too.

Wed, March 13, 2024

BMW.  That is what today was about!  After having breakfast together in the hotel lobby, we got ready and "out the door" by 10:30 or 11.  It just takes us awhile to get out of here.  We got an Uber to the BMW Museum and the BMW Welt or "World".  Two separate places (across the street from each other), one is a museum about the history and one is a massive showroom.  We spent many hours at each location.  Here are some pics.  Both these places are really out of this world amazing, in terms of design, creativity, and innovation.  

The BMW Museum

moving display of balls on strings

BMW made engines for airplanes in the 30s

a clay concept car from a few years ago

Dave's dream....a BMW Z8 from the 90s or early 2000s.

the elevator ride down from the top of the tour

our steps on the pad counted up and showed how much energy was collected to power electric devices

Inside the BMW World - just incredible

These robotic baristas made us iced coffee!

Eli requested a granola bar and the robots served that up as well

We Ubered it back to our hotel (15 minutes) and relaxed a bit... my left foot was hurting from all the walking. Making dinner plans at the moment.  Tomorrow is the looong 3-castle tour day (10 hr private tour!), and Friday we plan to tour Dachau concentration camp, then we are planning a day trip to Salzburg on Saturday!  We fly home Sunday.

Thurs, March 14, 2024

We set the alarms for 6:10 this morning.  We all successfully got up and got ready and met for breakfast together in the lobby.  

omelet station with bacon and hashbrowns

other things - pancakes, fruits, grains, cereals, veggies, fish, ham, bread, juice

Then we met our tour guide, Stephan, who was right on time, at 7:45 in front of the hotel front entrance.  He had a very nice 8-seater Mercedez-Benz van with comfy seats for all.  He was friendly and chatted with us for the 2 hr car ride to Neuschwanstein Castle.  Once we got out of the Munich circle, he cruised at 100 mph on the autobahn, a network of highways in Germany without speed limits. 

leaving Munich we saw the location of the 1972 Olympics.

As we caught the first views of the castle, he pointed them out to us.  The mountains of Austria were such a beautiful backdrop!

He guided us to see Neuschwanstein first (means "New Swan Stone"), then Hohenschwangau castle (means "High Swan District").  They aren't "old old" castles.  A little info on each:

Hohenschwangau Castle was mentioned the first time in records of the 12th century.

Until the 16th century its owners were the knights of Schwangau. During the following time it changed hands a couple of times and was partially destroyed during different wars.

In 1832 the later King Maximilian II., father of King Ludwig II., acquired the ruin and had the castle rebuilt according to original plans. After its completion it used to be the summer and hunting residence of the Bavarian royal family. In his whole life, the famous Bavarian King Ludwig II. spent a few weeks each summer in Hohenschwangau.

Since 1923 the Wilttelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds owns Hohenschwangau Castle.

Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwid II, and his parents lived in Hohenschwangau castle.  King Ludwig II wanted to build a bigger and better castle than his parents and it became "the new" castle.  He was a shy and withdrawn king and did not built the castle with hosting in mind.

Neuschwanstein is a castle of the paradox; it was built in the 19th century in Bavaria when courts no longer had strategic and defensive purposes. If you come to visit this castle, you will be amazed by the stunning landscape that surrounds it. Also, Neuschwanstein lies very close to the town of Fussen, which is also a popular tourist destination in Germany. The construction of the Neuschwanstein castle began in 1869, and initially, it was projected to last three years.

But Ludwig II wanted the castle to be perfect, so the immense building was not finished even at Ludwig’s death in 1886 and is not finished. Neuschwanstein Castle has a beautiful inner garden surrounded by a walled courtyard. It even has an artificial cave. Neuschwanstein Castle’s inside interior is as beautiful as its outside. Though only 14 rooms were finished before Ludwig II’s sudden death in 1886, these rooms were majestically decorated.

It is famous for being a great representative of the Romantic period, where war scenes are painted without any blood and ideas of famous people visiting there (Martin Luther) are pictured but aren't proven or real.

the best views of the castle are from walking out onto this bridge.  

We then took a walking path towards Neuschwanstein, and could see Hohenschwangau with great views.  We did go to this one second. 

that yellow castle is Hohenschwangau Castle

front entrance of Neuschwanstein

We began our audio-guided tour at 11:30 and got through it in about 45 minutes.  We all held devices to our ear.  The most impressive thing to me was the woodwork on Ludwig's bed!  

I was messing with my Pro camera settings and zoomed in 30x and took this pic of the peak of the mountains you see in the pic right above

This is Ludwig's throne room without a throne - unfinished.  He died mysteriously when he was 40 and the cause and reasons around his death are still unkown.

View from the porch

walking out of the tour towards the exit we walked through the modern 1800s kitchen

view of the mountains from Hohenschwangau castle

It was a lot of walking, and my foot got pretty sore (12K steps for the day!).  We sat down for a quick lunch and met our guide back at the vehicle for a ride to the Linderhof castle (another one of Ludwig II castles copied after Versailles, but on the way, the roads were unexpectedly closed because of a forest fire!  We saw fire trucks and helicopters carrying large buckets of water to places we couldn't see.  We did ask to stop at a picturesque location with a still lake and gorgeous mountains and got some amazing pictures!  This was actually in Austria, right over the border.

our guide took some great pics...this one is us of just the backdrop of the reflection so it looks upside down.  So neat!

stopping by the side of the road for these pics -- this was our tour van!

Stephan tried to make up for the castle we didn't get to see by taking us to three more places "on the way home".  One was Pilgrimage Church of Wies (German: Wieskirche) in Steingaden.  There is a legend of why this church was built:

"It is said that, in 1738, tears were seen on a dilapidated wooden figure of the Scourged Saviour. The legend of this miracle resulted in a pilgrimage rush to see the sculpture.^[1] In 1740, a small chapel was built to house the statue but it was soon realized that the building would be too small for the number of pilgrims it attracted, and so Steingaden Abbey decided to commission a separate shrine. Construction took place between 1745 and 1754, and the interior was decorated with frescoes and with stuccowork in the tradition of the Wessobrunner School. "Everything was done throughout the church to make the supernatural visible. Sculpture and murals combined to unleash the divine in visible form".^[2]

  

this is the little chapel built to commemorate the legend

this massive church was built because the little chapel did not meet the needs of the swarms of people that visited!

Vanessa saw some horses and visited them - it was a very cute peaceful little town with an unusually large church!

The second place we visited (drove through) was Oberammergau - and the exact moment he said we were going there I started to remember a story from history when the kids were in homeschool. The more he told the more I remembered.  The legend (well, a 400 year promise!) is this:

"Vow

According to legend: an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated Bavaria during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Bad Kohlgrub was so depopulated that only two married couples remained alive. The village of Oberammergau remained plague-free until 25 September 1633, when a man named Kaspar Schisler returned home after working in the nearby village of Eschenlohe. Over the next 33 days, 81 villagers would die, half of Oberammergau's population. On 28 October 1633, the villagers vowed that if God spared them from the plague, they would perform a play every 10 years depicting the life and death of Jesus. Nobody died of plague in Oberammergau after that vow, and the villagers kept their word to God by performing the passion play for the first time in 1634.^{[6]: 101–111 "}

The town of Oberammergau performs this play every decade, and the year they perform next is 2030.  People are required to be from the town.  They put on over 100 performances in the year they perform.  It's pretty amazing.

This is the theater where the Passion Play is performed.

During the off season of performing the Passion Play, other performances are here.

the back side - it has an open air roof!

We were all feeling a little snacky/hungry at this point, so we stopped for snacks at a gas station to get through the 2 hr ride back.

Our last stop was the Ettal Abbey.  It is a monestary from the 1300s still in operation by monks.  We couldn't go inside, but it was cool to be there.  We crossed paths with a couple monks and got some neat pics.

original gothic art from 1300s

We drove back to Munich for about an hour.  We all had a taste to go back to that first Italian restaurant we went to the first night, so we asked to be dropped off there, which was only 2 blocks from the hotel.  Eli took the selfie this time!

Friday, March 15, 2024

Sleeping in is just easy too easy when you're not quite adjusted to the time change.  I think all 6 of us were up and had to get down to the breakfast area by 9:40 before it closed.  Then we had to "get ready" for the day.  We requested an Uber and got a ride to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.  We didn't really know how long we would spend here.  It was free to get in.  Dachau was the first place the Nazis originally set up (1933) as a political prison camp and was eventually turned into a place of forced labor and also where mass murders of Jews occurred.  It was the longest camp in operation until liberated in April l945.  

The whole place was somber.  We walked around and read all the posters in different places.  The two barracks we went through were rebuilt representations of what used to be there, the remaining 30 spots where the barracks were torn down are labeled with a cement border showing where it was built and given a number.

We spent about 1.5 hours walking around the grounds.  The worst part was seeing the "Old" and "New" Crematoriums, where Jews were stripped of everything, "showered" (but gassed), bodies moved and burned, ashes dumped.  There are ash dumping pits that have been turned into memorials.

The control building where the kitchen, laundry, offices, etc used to operate were turned into a massive very long museum where the content was tastefully displayed with tons of content explaining every detail about Dachau and aspects of the whole Holocaust.  How it started, the rise of the Third Reich, how the German nation got to that point in the first place (which takes a great deal of historical knowledge), the 1933-1945 time frame of its operation, how the surrounding nations dealt with it, how the news about it was complete propaganda and false information to the rest of the world, how the Nazis were prosecuted during trials for war crimes, it went on and on. We could not take the time to read everything, or we would have been there for a week.  The kids attention spans were not up for it either. We arrived at 12:45 and left at 3:45.

I am glad we went.  We experienced real life exposure to a place where something horrible happened in our world's not-so-distant history.  I know they'll learn more about it in their lives and will remember being here.  

Old train tracks, and the building is the main entrance

"Works Will Set You Free" - Nazi propaganda message on gate when entering.  This gate is a replica of the original, which was stolen and found, and put in the museum.

The English portion reads " May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect for those their fellow men."

Perimeter fence

one of the 32 barracks rebuilt to show what it would have looked like

To the left were 16 and to the right were 16 barrack locations

The Old Crematorium.  This one was too small to keep up with the demand so a larger one was built.

The new crematorium - enter on the left

one of the "shower rooms" (gas chambers)

a lot of murders happened here also, so the body didn't need to be moved to the cremation site

Graves of Thousands Unknown

Graves of Thousands Unknown

Monument commemorating the evacuation marches of prisoners

We walked back towards the exit and stopped at the cafe, and got some lunch.  We couldn't find an Uber to get a ride back, so we got a Taxi.  Most expensive ride of the week!  We asked to be dropped off at the southern end of the English Garden and see for our own eyes the fact that Munich had a place to surf.

The place where people surf is called Eisbachwelle, and it is a manmade river with a created "forever wave" where surfers jump on and take their turns til they "crash" and float on down the river and get back up for another try.  It was really fun to watch.

A very dark sky in the west looked like a rainstorm was about to hit, so we walked 2 blocks to a nearby coffee shop to wait out the storm.  

We used the last hour of daylight to walk a few trails in the English Garden.  It was a wet, not-very-pretty experience, but it was still nice.  We only walked as far as the Monopteros (a circular replica of a Greek temple built in the 19th century for Ludwig I), took some pics, and decided to walk towards Old Town Munich again for souvenirs and dinner.

We walked by a few places of significance - Odeonsplatz, Residenz Munchen, but we kept on walking.

We found a souvenir shop, Calvin fulfilled a desire to get McDonalds in Europe, then decided to get dinner at Hard Rock Cafe.  Bonus - they had free bathrooms!

18,000 steps later, Dave got me ice for my foot, and we collapsed in our hotel room after an Uber ride, and called it a night!
 

Saturday, March 16, 2024 

Today was a  booked tour to Salzburg, Austria.  It included a 2 hr train ride, 1 hr tour of the city, and free time to explore.

Train station

first glimpse of the Salzburg via train

Mirabelle - place where Maria in The Sound of Music sings "I have confidence" and dips her hand in the water of the pond

another view with the fortress of Salzburg in the background

the famous "Do-Re-Mi" steps where Maria in the movie is teaching the kids about the music scale and hops and down on them

Mozart Museum

views of Salzburg over the river

Mozart's birthplace

oldest coffee shop in maybe Europe? Started 1702.

Cathedral in Salzburg - we did not go in.

We didn't go to the fortress - it was an enormous stair climbing effort or cable car which we didn't quite have time for

tried some original Mozart chocolates

We got some sausage sandwiches too, didn't picture that.

in front of Mozart's childhood home. His birthday was Jan 27, 1756. We did go inside and tour it!

leaving to go to the meeting point

this is a double chocolate cake with marmalde in the middle...I forgot the history of this but it is legendary in this area

So naturally we had to try a piece...we all had a bite and it was ...okay.

it was a little chilly! Waiting for the bus.  The girls hug it out and the boys...

...well, Calvin gives Eli a hard time everywhere we stand still

The train ride back was uneventful.  We found one last restaurant we had wanted to try and we were glad we did! It was a simple menu with burgers/fries but it was a very cool vibe, the food was yummy, and we enjoyed it.  The name means "Lucky hands" or "Hands in Luck".  I asked the waiter what it meant in English when we walked away and he told me with with his hands up and a funny questioning expression like he had no idea why either! 

We sat up in a raised area with a bench all around

surrounded by birch trees

We spent the majority of the night packing.  The plan was to be in the hallway at 6:30am.  

Sunday, March 17, 2024

And they were ready.  We came out of our room at 6:30 and all of them were standing in the hallway with packed suitcases.  Amazing.  I wish I'd gotten a pic of that.  

This is my last Germany picture - the last breakfast, before 24 hours of continuous travel.

Travel it was...smooth, thankful, uneventful, and TIRING.  Uber to Airport at 7:30am.  9 hr flight to Charlotte, not much sleep, lots of movies, getting up to stretch a lot.  Layover in Charlotte, ate a meal, 2 hr flight to Chicago, shuttle to parking location, drive 4.5 hrs to Iowa.  Kids were able to sleep on that car ride but David and I tag teamed driving home keeping each other awake.  Safely arrived at 12:30am Monday, and a quick night of sleep led into school after spring break, and back to the office.

Thanks for reading my journal.  It is mostly a record for my family but if you enjoyed it, then that's wonderful!  I actually wrapped up typing about the last two days at 6am on Tues morning because I couldn't sleep anymore.  Looking forward to getting back to a regular sleep schedule.