Sunday morning Linda and I rode a train into Munich. We arrived before we could check in, so left our panniers at the hostel before riding deeper into Munich. We ate a late breakfast after riding through the Munich equivalent of Central Park. Rain started to fall, so we headed back to the hostel to check in. Linda, exhausted after several days at the water park, took a long nap while I wandered about Munich. Sunday night we picked up food from some nearby takeaway restaurants.
Monday morning we left the hostel headed for the second-nearest bicycle store, as the closest wouldn’t open until 2 pm. On the way, we purchased tape. We also visited several stores looking for something creative to create skid plates on the bottom of the boxes to facilitate dragging. We came up with a number of solutions, but we eventually settled on plastic garden edging.
From there we headed to the bike store, picked up a couple of boxes, and carried / dragged them back to the hostel. One box was the perfect size to pack wind as bicycle. The other one was substantially larger, well beyond the limits of what the airline would permit. My boxed up Linda’s bike, and got partway through disassembling mine. By then it was 2:00 p.m., and we went to the other bike store. The manager of the store, an American from Kansas, dug around and found us a box, with the offer of more if we needed them.
That box fit my bicycle much better, and we mostly finished packing up by mid-afternoon. We purchased Metro tickets, and wandered about Munich. Visited a few churches.
Linda found the big farmers market. Unfortunately we missed the Rathaus clock display by 20 minutes.
Wandering back towards the Metro we found the local surfing scene.
We cooked dinner back at the hostel kitchen.
Tuesday, Linda felt under the weather, and we spent most today just hanging out at the hostel. We did ride the large Ferris wheel just outside the hostel before grabbing food nearby.
When walking back to the hostel Monday evening, we had noticed a large platform cart left by the curb outside a shopping mart close to the hostel, perfect for, say, hauling two bicycles to the train station. I eventually moved that cart closer to the hostel, on the hopes that we’d be able to use it later. Tuesday morning that cart was gone, but we saw another of the same carts on the other side of the building close to the train station. And that cart was gone when we came back Tuesday afternoon. But by that point, I had a plan. I grabbed another cart and dragged it around the corner to a small out-of-the-way garden area.
We went to bed early on Tuesday, because Wednesday would start early. I work Wednesday morning at 4:30 a.m., took a shower, and headed out to check on ” my ” cart. It was still there! I happily wield the cart over to the hostel. We dragged the bikes down to the elevator, and onto ” our ” cart.
From there it was a trivial matter to wheel the bicycles to the train station, load them onto the elevator, and drag them a short distance through the train station to another elevator, and then onto the platform for the train to the airport. I had already purchased the tickets Tuesday night.
We had gone through meticulous packing for the bikes before we left home for making sure that the boxes were the right size, and the right way, both a half a pound below the limit set by the airline. Not having the same resources at the hostel, we loaded them up and guessed. My experience has been that generally the airlines on the European side care a great deal less than those on the American side about shipping bicycles. Only after I had turned my bicycle over to the oversized luggage desk did the attendant ask how much the bicycle weighed. I answered, “under 50 pounds” which she accepted without question. They never asked Linda. The airline also neglected to charge us for the bicycles headed homeward. We breezed through Munich security, even with Linda bringing peanut butter. We even rolled through US customs, with no one even bothering to check the bicycle boxes.
For the vast majority of my trips, I’ve flown into RDU, reassembled the bicycle, and ridden home. Or even, when I rode to Buffalo, deciding it was just easier to ride home than take a bus or train. Wednesday, between Linda’s preference, and the time it would take to assemble not one but two bicycles for our evening arrival, we opted to take a taxi home. That lead to some excited cab drivers at the airport who couldn’t _quite_ figure out how to load two bicycles in boxes. They eventually gave up and shooed us away. We called for a taxi, and received a vehicle capable of carrying both bicycles. A taxi that included a driver who liked asking trivia questions the entire ride home.
Now to catch up the rest of life, which has kept moving all the time we were gone!