Damn if German trains aren’t punctual. We pulled into the Munich Hauptbahnhofat (Central Station) at 6:20 on the dot. The overnight train wasn’t quite as smooth as our Prague to Budapest journey a few days prior. We got chastised from the conductor for having neglected to print paper copies of our tickets, and the ride was punctuated more frequently, flooding the blinds-less cabin with light, beeping noises, and juddering stops at each waypoint.
Luckily for us, there would soon be plenty of time for uninterrupted landscape viewing. We were greeted at the train station by papercuts of pretzels, beer steins, and the traditional blue-and-white checkered print of Oktoberfest (more in a later post). With hotel prices blisteringly high on account of the holiday, the train station was littered with tourists spread head-to-toe on cardboard boxes lining the floors. Drunken men clad in lederhosen. Women with smeared eyeliner smoothing out wrinkled dirndls. German policemen prodding the passed-out bodies with nightsticks. Train lockers, for storing bags and suitcases, were unsurprisingly in high demand. Our early arrival was fortuitous if only to snag an empty one before boarding the S-Bahn to Herrsching.
Belongings safely stowed in Munich, we already felt like we’d “made it.” We planned to spend the afternoon hiking the three miles to Andechs Monastery, known equally for its impressive church as for its capacious beer garden. We followed King Ludwig’s Way, a 73-mile trail named after the 19th-century German king most famous for financing construction of Neuschwanstein, his made-for-Disney dream castle, that we would later visit. The path ran through meadows and forest clearings, rife with classical Bavarian lakes and hills.
Heathens that we are, we had no idea that the trail had long been a pilgrimage site for reliquaries of local saints. Even more damning, it took us halfway through watching an elaborate processional outside the church—complete with parade, band, bells, a covered canopy, and candle-lighting—to remember that it was Sunday. We were dressed in far worse than our Sunday best, but were relieved when we made our way to the beer garden that we were at least more sanctimonious than the members of the International Beer Team (gender ratio of about 18:1), sporting mullets and dressed in bright orange t-shirts.
The brewery was unique in that it was run by monks. “Not the Buddhist kind,” Courtney was quick to remind me, lest I get my hopes up. We got dirty looks from three members of the Team for ordering mere ½ litres of Dunkel and Weiss, but made up for it with a pretzel, potato salad, sauerkraut, and two enormous fried pork knuckles that had to be skimmed off the animal with a bone saw.
Instead of backtracking the three miles back to Herrsching, we decided to walk eleven miles to Starnberg, the next city on King Ludwig’s Way. Like most of our plans, however, it was easier said than done. The heavy lunch sloshing in our bellies, we crossed farmer’s roads, rolling grasslands, at least one miniature golf course, and a curious stable of horses dressed like striped zebras, before making it to the S-Bahn station. From there, it was a thirty-minute ride back to Munich Central Station, stepping over more sleeping revelers to retrieve our bags from the lockers, and a two-hour Metro-North-like train to Füssen. The kindly proprietors of Maurushaus set down two “welcome” steins of Bavarian dark when we staggered in, and we knew that we’d “made it” once again.