Some ridiculousness. That's a lie. A lot of ridiculousness at Oktoberfest. It all started with the travel.
Our flight was 40 minutes late, which is about par for the course leaving Catania. I settled in for a nap... then I woke up and we were still on the ground. Then there was an announcement in Italian. All the Italians groaned. An announceent in English... Someone decided they didn't want to fly and got off the plane. So every person and every piece of luggage had to get off the plane, it had to get a security sweep, then we could reboard. Did I mention that our layover in Rome was only an hour and a half? Needless to say we missed the connecting flight, shouldn't have because it sat on the tarmac for 40 minutes... but that's neither here nor there.
The next flight on our airline would het us in 24 hours later, and 5 hours after our beer tent reservation. TO THE TRAIN STATION!
We missed the train that went directly to Munich because we had to wait for our friend's bike box to get offloaded from our flight. Because who doesn't go do an Ironman in Maiorca right after Oktoberfest? There was another train, but it went through Florence and we couldn't buy the ticket all the way through. So we just bought tickets to Florence and got on our way, after getting some bottles of wine of course.
Okay, here's how to NOT travel from Italy to Germany.
WRONG!
The Florence airport closes from midnight to 4 am. Doors locked. No one allowed in the building. Their suggestion to us? "That gas station across the parking lot is open all night, you can go over there."
Over there we headed. We looked for nearby hotels, the closest one was 2 miles away. On booking.com it was rated "passable". And it was booked. Seriously?!?! After a few more searches there were no hotels and we gave up. And accepted our fate.
Not pleased with the Florence airport and really not pleased about spending the night outside.
My bed for the night, called the "motherlode". Seemed like a great idea to take the double wide one, but it was also the only one not under cover... then the rain started. We sat at the picnic tables that were covered, drank some wine, and played heads up until about 2am. Then took a nap until 4 when the airport opened again. After being homeless for one night I can say with certainty that it's not the life for me.
One metro ride into the city and one nap later... OKTOBERFEST!!
Thanks for the photobomb rando dude.
Met up with an Iraq war buddy. And planned a bike tour for the next day.
Mike's Bike Tours. Did it when I was 16 still fun at 30.
Urban surfing. Looks terrifying.
Memorial to objectors to the Nazi party.
Good luck in Munich!
Glockenspiel!
Got to watch the entire Glockenspiel from up above.
I did not eat ANY of that cookie. I can't imagine why anyone did.
Showing off mad beer skills.
Nothing looks as good as a Dirndl.
Took a quick road trip to Nuremberg as well. So many churches.
No comments:
Post a Comment