Great Day Gone Terribly BAD!

9/24/2009

This day was so memorable it deserves two posts. And… In Frankfurt our hotel charged some ridiculous rate like 18 euro per day to get wireless internet. So any “must use internet” situations we went to an internet café. As a result, I wasn’t able to post the blogs up everyday, and will have a mass posting when we get to Paris.

Today started off great, well not great but very pleasant. We woke up after a long night on the computer of dealing with my credit card problem and then figuring out our next steps. So as the day began, we intended to (as planned the night before) do a day trip to Zugspeitz, come back to the hostel and pick up our packs, then take our first real eurail train to another destination, which is Heidelberg for a relaxing night there at a quirky hostel. Unfortunately, I did a lot of the planning of this plan and it did not occur to me to check the Eurail timetables of train departure times or even to figure out how long this day trip might take. At this point, I had not looked at the timetable book to even figure out how to use it.

So we get off to a kinda slow start. I think we woke up around 7:30, went down stairs to do some work on the computer which I didn’t finish, eat breakfast, go back upstairs to shower and repack my pack, rushed to check out at 9:30, but we still hung around the lounge area for a little bit to finish up the work on the computer and get all of our duck in a row. A train to the mountain leaves every hour so we figure that by the time we got everything settled, we wouldn’t make it to central station in time for the 10:30 train, so we decide to take the 11:30 train.

Once we get to the station, I become aware that the train to the mountain is 1.5 hrs one way, so that is 3hr round trip travel time. In addition to that, the last train to leave for Heidelberg is at 7:23. That gives us around 5 hours to get up and down the mountain and factor in time to get back to the hostel to pick up our packs and get back to the train station. We figure that should be plenty of time and if anything we would just be cutting it close. As the day went on we figure out that we thought seriously wrong.

To get to the top of the mountain you get on a tram/cable car deal that chugs along the mountain, stopping at random stops for random amounts of time and eventually takes to you to a place high up on the mountain, where you can catch a wire tram/gondola deal to the summit. The cable car takes about an 1.2 hrs to get to the gondola station, where we had to wait 25 min for the next trip to the summit.

At the summit it was totally worth it. It was very cool to say that we were at the tallest point in Germany and for a portion of the time we were up there we were in the clouds. We snapped some great pictures, saw some intense people climbing/hiking to the top of the mountain, but were aware to catch the next tram down, which left 20 min from our arrival at the top. Needless to say we weren’t up there for very long, but in reality after 20 min, if you are not eating up there or in the mood to chill out you are ready to go, there isn’t that much more to see.

So we catch the tram down and everything on the way down is taking way longer than expected due to random waiting periods. We realize that we will be able to catch the 5:04 train back to Munich, which will put us arriving in at 6:35 and give us roughly 55 min to get to and from the hostel for our pack pick up. This was not the case. I guess the trains didn’t coordinate their routes, because we were held up for 20 min at a random station so that another tram going the opposite way could get off/pass us on the tracks that we needed to use. We don’t get into Munich until 6:45 meaning that we have 33 min to do the pack pick up and it takes about 20 min each way to get to the hostel on the metro. We are running through the subway stations. At one point, I got on a train that’s doors closed on Katherine as she was getting on so she got cut off and we got separated. Thank goodness there was another train right behind the one I was on that was going to the next stop (the stop we needed) also that she could get on and we met up five minutes later. None the less it was stressful, but eventually realize we have no chance in hell at making the train to Heidelberg and need to reconsider our plan.

Mind you as we are on the train back to Munich, Katherine and I are stressing out majorly as we watch the clock tick by. We are trying to come up with every possible out of the box option that we can think of to either get to Heidelberg tonight or just not stay in Munich for another night. Our main issue is that we had already booked a hostel in Heidelberg and since we were below the 24 hr cancellation time slot, we are pretty sure that we are going to get charged for the night at the hostel anyways. The first thing we do at this point is cancel the Heidelberg reservation, which the lady cannot tell me if we will be charged the full amount or not.

The cost of staying another night in our hostel in Munich is 31 euro, making it a 50 euro night, but it would offer us a solid, safe place to sleep with showers and a free breakfast so that we are well rested and can just continue onto Frankfurt in the morning. I had an extremely hard time wrapping my head around this figure and come up with the bright idea of taking a sleeper train to a random point in Germany because we have this awesome eurail pass so it should just be a small fee, definitely less than 31 euro, and then we can just get on a different train in the morning and boogie on to Frankfurt for much cheaper. At this point we are at our wits end (we haven’t had a solid meal since breakfast) with figuring out this situation and tensions are high. Katherine does not think this is a good idea, but she humors me and we put our packs on and tromp to central station, via subway, to check this situation out. Mind you doing this movement with our packs on is no easy feat. When we get to the station, after inquiry, the eurail clerk tells us that it will be 20 euro a person to ride in the sleeper car regardless of our pass. At that point, I realize Katherine’s idea was much better even though it would cost us 10 euro more.

It was probably the best 10 euro I have spent so far on this trip because unlike if we were on the train, we got a good dinner and had some drinks (well we could have done this on the train plan but it probably would not have been as good and cost way more), got a good nights sleep, could take our time in the morning, got showers, had a free breakfast (which also gave us the opportunity to grab food for a free snack for the day), and not feel rushed or stressed when in taking the train to Frankfurt in the morning.

We started talking to a very nice guy who was checking us in (for the second time that week and on the same day that we checked out earlier) at our hostel and we come to find out that our hostel is the most expensive hostel in Munich, but also probably one of the nicest in Europe (so we were spoiled in that sense). Also it is a well-known fact that sleeper trains are expensive and bed and breakfasts tend to be cheaper than hostels. These are all good things to know when planning for the trip later on down the road.

So we end the night by getting pizza (again for our third meal in Germany) and beer. This put us in infinitely better moods and at that point we were ready to move forward. But holy cow, what a day. We learned a lot so that was a positive.

Other weird things about Munich. The eat bowls of radishes, whole radishes, with the green and leaves on them. I thought this was extremely weird thing to order to eat when you are out and drinking beer. People would always bring their dogs on the metro and most of the dogs were very well behaved. I wouldn’t recommend petting them because you don’t know how people will react and some of the dogs smell and feel bad. I saw my first german Shepard in Germany in a train station.

The main issues that we are having with planning is that for comfort reasons we like to plan about two steps ahead, but if things don’t work out the way we want them to for example like with missed trains like today, then we have to deal with cancellation fees (which is sometimes not a fee just paying for the whole thing without receiving it). But then if you don’t plan ahead you feel stressed out… and then if you plan too far ahead you feel overwhelmed. Finding the balance is very important and seems hard to do. I am sure that we will figure it out once we get on the move and into a routine.