You can look, but you can’t touch!

We packed up the hotel room that had turned into a lot of a mess over the five nights we were there. Once again, we skipped breakfast in lieu of some extra sleep time. Keith was overheating as the hotel room wasn’t able to cool much, when he mentioned it at the front desk, they explained that it was because it is an eco hotel and the system will only handle so much heating or air conditioning. We stepped outside to make a plan of action to get to the Eurocar Rental close to the Marionplatz. Our first thought was to catch an Uber, but I stopped a taxi waiting outside of the hotel so we jumped in. The car was tiny and barely fit both of our suitcases. I’ve noticed a lot of small, itty, bitty cars around here. Not a single big, bad 4×4 truck like in Alberta! As the taxi driver pulled a U-turn to get us going, he cut off a large courier truck that expressed their disapproval with a long blare of the horn. Despite the rocky start, the trip downtown was uneventful, we really noticed how narrow the roads were. It was less obvious when we were travelling by train and my foot, in the car much more noticeable. Let’s just say, I’m glad it was Keith that volunteered to do the driving! We hadn’t really looked at the time as we were both in full zombie mode and working on operating with no coffee and maaaaybe a small hangover. Turns out, our reservation for the car wasn’t until 11am and we were almost thirty minutes early. The kind fellow behind the desk pointed us in the direction of the nearest coffee shop. We were able to leave the bulky luggage at Eurocar and found coffee. I had a sandwich as well, I was starting to feel like I was going to fade away. A couple cappuccinos later, we took a slow wander back down the road and got the car rental sorted out. 

Adventure number one while driving: getting out of the parkade: did I mention roads are tight? Parkades are tighter! No wonder everyone has teeny vehicles. I was officially assigned as the trip navigator plus the car was equipped with a navigation system so between the two we had our navigation set for Dachau. Once we got to the final destination the nav took us to we very quickly realized that we were set for downtown Dachau, not the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Downtown was beautiful though! It was great to see. I’m loving all of the colourful buildings and stone architecture, it seems like there is a huge clock tower on every other corner. 

We took our time touring through the Concentration Camp, it was so impressive! What a HUGE facility, we were able to walk through where the barracks were for the prisoners (only reconstructed foundations are there now) but the number of them and the size of each building especially knowing that they were designed for 200 prisoners each, but housed up to 2,000 by the end. 

We were able to walk through the building that housed the gas chambers and the crematorium. Oi! That was HEAVY! I felt like everyone there had the same disgusted/horrified look on their face. They had reconstructed barracks with the triple bunk beds, tiny washroom facilities (especially for the number of prisoners in each block). 

The Maintenance Building is repurposed as a museum, there was a lot to see there as well. This stop could have easily taken two days to throughly see and take in everything. We spent almost three hours there before pointing our car towards Ingolstadt.

We had booked an Airbnb that was nice & close to the Audi factory and had a tour booked at the factory as well. We had a touch of confusion getting checked in to the Airbnb, but did eventually get the hidden key and found the room. We got settled and had a quiet night, we chatted with Peter for a little when he got home. 

We had a schedule to keep to for the Audi factory tour. Again, I had some confusion as when I booked the tour it looked like the only English speaking tours of the factory floor were sold out so I took whatever tour was available and booked our ticket. We both expected to tour only the Audi museum. Turns out we got to see the factory after all! It was so impressive! Wow, wow, wow. It was PRISTINELY clean, the workers looked decently happy to be doing their tasks, my automation and machinery was mind blown. Everything is so scheduled,  so organized, so precise. Nothing like the scrambling shit show of my job. We had (once again) taken our time getting up and moving in the morning so we hadn’t had a coffee. We made it to the meeting point for the tour in time, but hadn’t consumed the much-needed caffeine requirement for the morning. It’s been hard to judge if we are tired from jet lag, or from too much fun and excitement during the days. 

After the tour Keith and I hurried directly to the canteen for some coffee. We then wandered into the Audi museum. Neither of us knew that one of the four auto groups that joined to form Audi (thus the four rings in the logo) had been mostly a motorcycle manufacturer. There were some beautiful vehicles in the museum, we spend our time looking at things and then decided food was our next priority. Plan A had been to eat at the fancy-dancy restaurant on site but we weren’t in the mood for any of the offerings we saw. 

We sniffed out a Brauhaus instead! Gasthausbrauerei Daniel had just one room of many open for the lunch crowd. I opted for a trio of fancy butter/cheese dips served with bread & pretzel. Keith decided on schnitzel and was not disappointed. The group next to us was a table of elderly men, sitting around catching up on local gossip (or so I concluded). I decided they were the German equivalent of the A&W breakfast crowd that we see so often in Canada.

We then wandered through  the “old town” area of Ingolstadt. We wandered into a coffee shop & sipped some cappuccinos at an old Singer sewing machine. I wanted to see the bottle of champagne that this huge cork had come from. 

We wandered some more and happened to see a cool looking castle. Turns out it had the army museum in the castle. It was great, most of the displays were across three levels of the castle. One particularly impressive display was the Vissers tent. Keith had read one of the placards stating that it was the original. I noticed some areas that had been replaced. We were admiring the tent and Keith was pointing out one section of the tent…we he got to close with his hand gestures and set off the alarm. Eek! I was worried we were going to get kicked out of Germany, but we didn’t. Keith apologized and tried to explain to the security guard that appeared what had happened. The guard didn’t speak much English but also let us continue on our museum tour. Fweh! Big sigh of relief there! We had another guard chat with us a little while later (in German) we finally understood after her gesture to the time that the museum was about to close. I believe she was trying to say if we wanted to see the last displays to start going up MORE stairs. There were three more levels that we accessed via an old metal spiral staircase. The tin soldier displays were so huge and so intricate. It would have been nice to spend more time there, but we’d already set off one alarm and didn’t want to push our luck.

By this time, we were ready for another beer. We wandered through the streets without a particular direction or purpose. We decided (or Keith decided) that he wanted to go to the one place we had found that serves IPA’s and pale ales. Zw0lf by Yankee & Kraut was the place to satisfy his craving! They don’t serve flight boards here, typically, but they did do small 100ml pours of each beer. We decided to have a few samples of each, we both tried pretty much everything other than the lagers on tap. The bartender was very helpful, and she spoke great English, which is always a treat! Finding people to speak English in Munich wasn’t an issue but outside of the big cities it’s a bit more of a challenge.

There was another brewery that we wanted to try out, it was also recommended by our Airbnb host, Peter. It was very close by. We wandered over found a table and this location did have flight boards. We ordered a flight each, and then Keith noticed a Eisbock offering on the menu board. He got so excited that he had to order that immediately as well! Eisbock is traditionally served around Easter time apparently, and is draft beer that is poured into a special glass container then frozen. To serve the beer, the glass container is opened and drained into a small carafe. The serving cups were teeny, tiny, frozen beer mugs (smaller than a shot glass) they were adorable! They didn’t have a large menu offering here, so we decided to wander elsewhere for food. We found a street vendor style Napoleon pizza place and shared a margarita pizza.