Weekend trip to Münich

This past weekend a good friend of ours and former room mate, Adam, was in Münich for work.  He didn't have to be there until Tuesday, but we had arranged to meet him Saturday morning in town and spend the weekend there so he came out a little early.

Saturday morning we got off to a great start.  We were packed & out the door 20 minutes before I estimated we needed to be to be in Münich by 11am.  We dropped the dogs off at the kennel, and for the first time Murphy didn't stand at the gate staring at us as we drove off.  He & Milo ran off and started playing with the other dogs, so we felt good about that.  We hope we can find a kennel like this back in the US when we move back home, the dogs absolutely love going there because they have all day to run around in a giant fenced in field and play with other dogs.  We hopped on the A8, and just had to stay on it all the way into Münich.  About 30 minutes in is when we hit a problem.  We came to a complete stop on the Autobahn in a traffic jam that stretch as far as I could see.  After 45 minutes we'd only moved about a kilometer.  At that point I pulled out my phone and found an App that gave Stau (German word for Traffic Jam) information.  The traffic jam we were in stretched for 6KM and so far we'd only gone 1.  According what I could read (it was in German) they had closed a section of the A8 off entirely for construction and were routing traffic through several small towns.  So you had all the traffic that drives on one of the busiest stretches of the Autobahn being singled down to a one lane exit that had a traffic light.  So you can imagine how slow going this was.  We eventually made it through, but thank goodness I could email back & forth with Adam because there was no way we were making the 11am meet time.  We didn't end up rolling into town until about 1:45.  What should have been a 2 hour drive ended up being 5 hours.  It ended up sort of working out, though, because it meant Adam could take a nap to fight off some of the jet lag.

Once we checked in to the hotel and met up in Adam's room, we hit the town.  First up was lunch, we were all hungry.  I'd checked on the map the day before and found an Augustiner Brew Pub around the corner, so we went there.  It was busy, but the food was delicious.  I had a quarter duck, quarter chicken and a kartoffel knoedel.  It's hard to describe the kartoffel knoedel...in fact, I've re-written this sentence five times trying to describe it and I just don't have the words other then it's a ball...made of potatoes.  How about a picture?

After that we took the train to the BMW museum.  The first thing I noticed about Münich's U-Bahn & S-Bahn system is how huge it is.  True, we were in the heart of the city, but the trains and the stations were enormous.  MUCH bigger the Stuttgart's.  Eventually we made it to the museum.

Shanna & I aren't big car people, but we both wanted to visit the "Big 3" while in Germany.  We'd been to Porche and Mercedes, which were located in Stuttgart, so now we had the last one to visit, BMW.  It was a neat museum.  If I had to rank the three, the Mercedes was by far the most impressive, then the BMW one, and finally the Porche museum.  One of the neat cars that stood out to me was this one below, the car Pierce Brosnan drove in the 1999 Bond film The World is Not Enough (notice the license plate).

At the end of the museum the had a special temporary exhibit where they had given BMW cars to artists and basically told them to use the car as their canvas.   They even had one that Andy Worhol had hand painted.

After the museum we went to a Paulaner restaurant.  I'd read that they were having a big Starkbier festival, but when we got there, it didn't seem like anything special was going on.  We had one drink, then decided to leave & head back to the hotel.  Once back at the hotel we asked the staff about the Starkbier fest.  Apparently it's outside town and only accessible by cab or car.  At this point it was almost 8pm and we didn't feel like going that far out when there was a good chance it'd be too packed to get in.  So I'd found a Hacker-Pschorr brewpub right around the corner.  We went in and this place was HUGE.  It also had a fancy sports bar in the back.  They had a special seasonal beer on tap called a Helles Weizenbock that was DELICIOUS.  One of the best German beers I've ever had.

After dinner we walked to the back where the sports bar was and caught the last 20 minutes of the Germany Vs. Kazakstan soccer game.  There was a pretty big crowd in there watching.  I'm not a big soccer fan, but when you're watching any sport with a passionate group it's hard not to have fun and cheer for Germany.  We ended up staying there the whole night because the service was fast, the beer was great, and it was nice to sit and catch up with Adam.

The next morning we got up and headed down to the S-bahn.  Adam had heard about a "Science Museum" he wanted to visit.  After doing some research I found it was called the Deutsches Museum and wasn't too far away.  This museum was absolutely enormous.  There wasn't enough time in the day to go through the entire thing.  It would easily take several trips.  They had some neat things in there, including Sputnik 1.  I'm not sure if it's a replica or the same thing...there was nothing on the sign to indicate it wasn't the real thing, but I've heard (and read on Wikipedia) that the real one is in the UN Building in New York.  They also had a training plane that the Wright Bro's used.

One of the neatest things there was the desk used by Ernest Walton and John Cockroft when they split the atom for the first time.

We were in the museum all morning and a large chunk of the afternoon.  Afterwards we decided to have a late lunch since we hadn't eaten yet and headed over to the Marienplatz.  That's the location of the famous Hofbrauhaus.

We were lucky and got a table immediately despite it being packed.  Lunch was great beer and traditional German food.

Afterwards we walked around the Marienplatz for a bit, but since it was raining we didn't stay long.

That was it...we headed back to the hotel, said our goodbyes to Adam, then drove home.  Thankfully the trip home didn't take nearly as long, only the expected 2 hours.  But we did drive by the same spot we got held up at, and it was still backed up for just as long.  I was glad we didn't have to sit in that both directions.

Click here to see the pictures, or any picture above.  There are more coming.  Adam took pictures with his camera, so when he gets back home and uploads them I'll merge them with our pictures and post an update that they are available for viewing.