The gray day matched perfectly with our hangovers. Tom, our Airbnb host, gave a dull wave from the living room, his hair matted at obtuse angles. “Oktoberfest should really just be one day,” he admitted, sitting in his underwear, and I suspected this wasn’t the first time he had this epiphany. Courtney and I nodded knowingly but did better not to speak.

“Just make sure to pace yourself,” a young German couple at Maurushaus told us before they left. We were sitting at the breakfast table, picking from the buffet spread of eggs, cereal, and cold meat on bread, and laying down a foundation that I would be grateful for later. Pace myself? No sweat. A single White Claw is often enough to leave my entire body red and hot as a sitting kettle. If there’s anything I know about drinking, it’s moderation.

It was officially October. Füssen was shrouded in a dull gray and cold rain was pattering on the pavement just beyond our window. Hoping for a slow start to recover from yesterday’s trek, we settled on a small café featuring “breakfast eggs” (soft-boiled eggs served in stately metal cups) and yogurt muesli. The ambiance, however, was less enticing. Disappointed by the soundtrack of angsty 2000s-era love songs (Ryan Cabrera, Maroon 5, and Hoobastank), we quickly abandoned the peaceful morning plan for a trip to what our guidebook called “a real-life fairytale oasis.”

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.

The outside is all black: steel entablature, blade walls, granite footpath. Inside, the temperature drops, and piercing string music is interspersed with grainy black-and-white war footage projected on mounted displays. An enormous T-54 tank sits in the center of the rotunda, dwarfed by thousands of passport-sized photos blown up to fill a six-story wall.