Now that all of the holiday rush is over, I can’t help but dream about the time we spent in Europe last month for our honeymoon. Not only was this a trip we had been planning on for many years, but it really was everything I thought it would be and more. David and I have only traveled out of the country together a handful of times and that makes for an adventure in itself. While many of those trips were the obligatory neighboring countries of Mexico and Canada, a trip to Nicaragua back in 2012 definitely left us outside of our comfort zone many times. We’ve been hoping to travel ever since but with a move across the country, those plans were put on hold – until now.
Years ago we had picked up a snowboarding magazine and read an article about the Arlberg region in Austria. We vowed then that we would go but it took us about five years to make it happen. Once we got engaged, I set the wheels in motion and began planning the trip and conveniently called it our honeymoon. Of the two of us, I am definitely the planner when it comes to vacations. While I’m not always a fan of having a set itinerary, it seemed fairly necessary for Europe and spending time in tiny mountain towns around Christmas. So our trip went a little like this – fly into Munich, sightsee there for a day, take the train to Austria and spend three days snowboarding in the Arlberg region, then take the train to Switzerland and find a resort that we thought would fit our snowboarding style for another three days of riding, followed by a day of sightseeing in Zurich where we would fly home from. The trip was a little under two weeks and went exactly as planned.
In order to break this up a bit, I’ll start with Germany. We flew Lufthansa from Seattle all the way to Frankfurt, Germany, a 10-hour flight that we definitely should have been sleeping on. If you ever have the choice to take Lufthansa or an American airline, go Lufthansa! Seriously they were around what seemed like every five minutes with FREE wine, cocktails, coffee, food, whatever our hearts desired. Plus there were a zillion awesome free movies to watch. Ultimately it was the superb service that probably kept us from sleeping, but hey, it sure felt good to feel wined and dined on an airplane. Upon arriving in Frankfurt, we went through customs and sat in a daze for about two hours before our connecting flight to Munich. Once in Munich, we had to conquer our first hurdle of trying to take a train from the airport to downtown where we were staying, about a 40 minute ride. It didn’t take too long to figure out that we needed to find the S-Bahn and off we were. For the one night in Munich I had booked a little hotel just 10 minutes walking from the Marienplatz (main square where all the action was) called Hotel Blauer Bock. Check-in was pretty seamless and we were able to store our absolutely massive snowboard bag in their luggage room (thank God) instead of having it take up space in our main room.
With about 40 hours of sleep under our belts in the last 48 hours we were ready to head out and explore Munich. I had only planned this one evening for us there, as we are not huge fans of sightseeing in big cities. If you ask either of us what our ideal vacation is the answer will likely involve snowboarding, surfing, or basically anything active. Therefore, we don’t spend much time in big cities when we travel. Our first (and pretty much only) stop in Munich was visiting the Marienplatz Christmas Market. We had heard from a good friend what a blast these things are and this one sure lived up to the hype. Basically you walk into the square and it’s surrounded by glittering lights, incredibly ornate architecture, hundreds of stands selling Christmas garb like ornaments, gingerbread, décor, and best of all, gluhwein. This hot-spiced wine is basically the perfect beverage for a winter evening. You find a stand, put down a deposit for the little ceramic mug, and can continue getting refills throughout the evening. You can get your deposit back at the end or you can keep the mug as a souvenir. Pretty awesome, right? That and there were giant Bavarian pretzels that were bigger than my head. In case you didn’t know, pretzels are definitely on my list of favorite foods. It was heaven. As we perused through, admiring the twinkling lights and blundering through some German trying to buy trinkets, the lack of sleep started to set in with force. By the time we were actually hungry for dinner – which I’m not even sure what meal it was for us at that time – we were totally exhausted. I think I had some sort of pork and dumpling dish, but that whole evening was basically a blur of being slightly buzzed from the gluhwein and extreme lack of sleep. We headed back to the hotel for an 8:00 bedtime.
After a night of tossing and turning we awoke to a new day. I wouldn’t say we were well rested that day but we were definitely functioning. We spent the morning perusing the shops and snapping photos. It was pretty relaxing and a nice way to say goodbye to our time in Munich. Later in the morning, it was off to Austria!
A few quick tips about traveling on trains:
1. The screens are where it’s at. We had purchased our tickets in advance on RailEurope, which was just one less step for the train station. After wandering around aimlessly for a few minutes in the station we realized that all we had to do was look at the big video screens for when our train was departing and what platform we had to be on. Your ticket will also tell you what class you’re in and the sign will give you letters that will tell you which is first and which is second class. When in doubt and you’re in second class, just walk to the back of the platform.
2. The trains we were on were labeled “reservations recommended” so we made them. Our next few destinations were high in the mountains so it seemed logical to do so. That being said, none of our trains were full so it didn’t really matter.
3. Bringing ski and snowboard gear – ugh! If you bring it, be prepared to lug it. We had one giant snowboard bag that held both of our boards, both of our boots, both helmets, and was padded by our outerwear. The thing weighed about 50 lbs. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend bringing your own gear but I think if we went again we would probably just bring our own boots and rent the boards to save space. There also isn’t a ton of room to put such a sizable bag on a train except for taking up a ton of space in the overhead storage. I also couldn’t imagine taking a taxi with that bag so luckily we were staying hotels that were short walks from each train station we traveled through. Also picture yourself dragging it around on cobblestones and think about what that will be like as most of the stations are in the middle of cities and most roads are cobblestone.
Stay tuned for the next segment – snowboarding in Austria!
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