–> Morning fog –> Afternoon mostly sunny – high temp 64ºF
When we woke up in the castle, the weather outside was truly castle worthy…
Truly foggy outside but the Mystery Machine was nowhere in sight.
Karen and I went downstairs to breakfast… we were the first and only ones there. We took our time, and eventually the boys trudged down to join us. After breakfast, we made sure to get the room all packed up, and then went walking around the castle more. At the front desk we were able to ask Christian, the son of the owners, about an interesting piece of furniture we had seen the day before that had a ying-and-yang symbol as well as swastikas.
Christian explained that the piece was placed here by the previous castle owner who was a German emissary to China and Japan in the 1920’s. The piece was purchased in the east, and brought to the castle. The “swastikas” are gammadion crosses which according to Wikipedia is considered to be a sacred and auspicious symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
With checkout time having passed, we loaded into the car and began our drive to Munich, first stopping at Dachau. The drive away from the castle, before getting on the autobahn, was as gorgeous as it was the day before.
The drive on the autobahn was as uneventful as the previous time, although we decided to capture some of the speed that we were witnessing.
We stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch where the non-standard menu was a disappointment to Aidan. He was so disappointed that he wasn’t going to eat. We got him a hamburger anyway, and I folded it in half (so it looked like a mouth) and had the hamburger talk to him. The hamburger said silly things in a german, then Italian, then french accent, and although Aidan never ate a lot, the talking burger did help pull him out of his funk and he did eat a little.
We stopped at Dachau. I created a separate post about that you can read here.
After leaving Dachau, we arrived at out apartment in Munich, and we immediately had a parking problem. The street in front of the apartment was well traveled and had a number of apartments along it. That meant no parking was available when we arrived. So we had to turn around and find somewhere along a side street. Based on a message I received from our AirBnB host, I thought I didn’t have to pay, but apparently 11:00pm Saturday to 8:00am Monday is the time that parking is free. Unfortunately I did not have any change for the machine, and no matter how many times I tried with my credit card, the machine just yelled something at me in German. So I put in all the change I had which got me 45 minutes, and then ai ventured down to the market to buy something and get change. Unfortunately, I chose to pay with a credit card and asked the cashier for change for €10 bill, to which he said no. So I was standing there with no change and groceries and the clock was ticking. I went back and found a 85c chocolate, went back through the line and paid cash and received enough change for the parking machine… finally! I know this doesn’t sound like much time (I skipped the part where I moved the car and also the 6 trips I made between the car and the apartment as I brought i the suitcases and kept trying the parking machines) but it was about 3 hours since we arrived!
We had noticed a corner store (that closed at 2:00pm on Sat.) that we could get stuff from the next day, and also a small food delivery service that had a bakery/cafe store front. We thought that could be a place to visit in the morning. Between a trip to the corner market that Karen had made, and the one I had made, we felt pretty good about being set to get through the morning of the next day, and planned another trip around lunch to set us up for the next two days.