Possenhofen - Vilshofen

When we went down for breakfast in the morning there were lots of people in a room who looked like they might be going walking or climbing. A lot of them must have arrived in the morning but some of them had stayed the night before.

After breakfast, once we had packed up, cleaned up and paid up, we got on the road.

Before I finish with Possenhofen though, I want to note that I have enormous regrets that we never took any photos at Possenhofen - unfortunately it was pretty much too dark when we were walking through from the station to the youth hostel (and on the way we were always hurrying to get the train). But I have memories (which have probably been embellished in my mind's eye of course) of the trees covered in lacy snow, unlike anything we saw elsewhere on our trip to Germany. It was quite beautiful. We do have one photo on our phone, but the quality is not great, and we also don't have a way to get the photo from the phone to the computer...

But back to the trip: All went fine until one of the freeways we had planned to take turned out not to be finished yet! However, we successfully negotiated our way through the outskirts of Munich and got onto the right road to get to Vilshofen.

Vilshofen is a small town on the Donau (Danube), in Eastern Bavaria, near the Austrian border. When we were in Germany the previous time, with a group of school students, the students were billeted out to families in Vilshofen, and we became friendly with the German teacher in charge of the stay - Winfried, and his wife Ursula. We had arranged to stay with them this time.

Landshut, where we stopped last time on our way to Vilshofen, was about halfway from Munich, but we reached it by 11am, and considering we were meeting Winfried at the Vilshofen Airfield at 3:30pm, we decided to fill in time in Landshut. However it was freezing cold, and Landshut seemed to have as much charm as Warrimoo (a place in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, which one of our friends has described as "the armpit of the Universe". It seemed we had found the other armpit in Landshut...)

Tim was just lamenting that there didn't seem to be a bookshop when I noticed one, so we spent about half an hour inside thawing out. We wandered around a bit more, even found a wool shop, though no wool worth buying, and then got some lunch. We also spent some time in an internet "cafe" which was slightly more like a dungeon than a cafe.

After lunch we set out for Vilshofen again, and found our way to the airfield. We met Winfried and Ursula there, and Winfried came in our car to direct us back to their place.

Ursula had put on a lovely afternoon tea of kuchen (cakes) and we settled in there for the afternoon and evening.

I have to admit here that from this day I no longer wrote in my travel diary, so the rest of the trip is reconstructed entirely from memory, with photos to assist.

Possenhofen - and yet another day trip to Munich

After breakfast, where once again we were the only ones, we caught the train to Munich again, so we could go and visit Hubert.

We could some shopping first and even found a shop with nice touristy things in it, rather than cheap and awful!

We went to visit Hubert, and he and Tim chatted some more about the thesis, and then we went on our way again - it was Hubert's first day back at work after 2 weeks holiday and he had 60 emails to read!

It was nice to be walking in Munich without enormous crowds. We did a bit more shopping and then decided to treat ourselves to lunch in the restaurant under the rathaus (town hall), which was very nice, though quite expensive. We both had wiener schnitzel. There was a strange party of people at the next table - a guy who appeared to be Russian, or slavic of some kind, who seemed to be out to lunch with his family. He seemed intent on showing off how much money he had, and kept making ridiculous demands of the waitresses. We felt very sorry for the waitresses.

After doing a bit more wandering and some more shopping we decided to go and visit the home stadium of Tim's favourite football team - Bayern Munich. So we caught the underground (the U-bahn) to Fröttmanning where Allianz Arena is, and discovered that despite the name, the U-bahn isn't always underground. The station at Fröttmanning was an enormous space age thing that reminded me of Olympic Park station here in Sydney - not surprising really! We walked about 10-15 minutes in the freezing bleak weather to the stadium, which can only be described as bizarre. It's a great round thing that looks like it's covered in a round puffy jacket - some people have likened it to a tyre. We were able to walk right in, and also visited the fan shop, which was huge. We discovered that there were tours of the stadium but they went for an hour and we wouldn't have had time to get back for dinner.

This second photo hopefully gives you some idea of the puffy covering on the stadium - you can see the lit stairs in the bottom part of the photo.

It was incredibly bleak, though amazingly not snowing, and this is a photo of a windmill that was right beside the stadium carpark, on a hill. I have not doctored the photo in any way, just to show you how dreary and cold it was. Brrrr!

We caught the U-bahn back into the city and changed for an S-bahn back to Possenhofen. There actually seemed to be more people staying there that night!

Possenhofen - with another day trip to Munich

During the night two more guests turned up, so we didn't have the whole youth hostel to ourselves for the whole night!

We caught the train into Munich again after breakfast, and as it was a Sunday there were no shops open, spent the day museum hopping. First we went to the State Greek and Roman Collection, though there didn't seem to be any Roman stuff there at all. A selection of antiquities on display is below.

This was after we accidently directed two Poms in the wrong direction to an exhibition they were after. We also discovered that contrary to our guidebook, exhibitions/museums do cost on a Sunday, though less than on other days.

After the museum we decided to brave the underground rail system and catch the train to the next museum. It went without a hitch, though the train driver didn't really seem to enjoy his job, at least if his announcements were anything to go by. We then walked to the next museum - the State Archaeology Collection, which we did the wrong way round (from latest to earliest periods), and Tim bought some Roman coins for his ancient history colleagues.

We then caught the train back into the centre of town, wandered around a little, found where Hubert (one of the two academics we met in Freiburg) worked, and walked along the most expensive shopping street in Munich (Versace, Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Armani etc) to the Ethnography Museum, which when we got there was so busy we decided we couldn't be bothered.

So we wandered back and caught the train back to Possenhofen. It was interesting that even though no shops were open (not even the tourist ones) there were still lots of people walking around, and there were thus buskers out, including the American Indian buskers (complete with feather headdresses) that we had also seen the day before.

When we got back to the youth hostel it appeared that is was just us and Otto again, but after dinner when we were watching tv (nothing worth watching) another guest turned up, to our and Otto's surprise.

Before dinner Tim went for a walk (I stayed warm inside and knitted and watched a German cooking show) and found the local schloss where Sissi grew up. He also walked along beside the lake, Starnbergsee, and watched the ducks freezing in the water.

Possenhofen - with a day trip to Munich

There was a large group of teenagers plus three adults who stayed overnight and left this morning. Tim spoke to one of them and they were a singing youth group. We made sure we got our breakfast before the hordes cleaned it all up!

We walked to the station to catch the train to Munich for the day, and just caught the train, only to discover that we needed to validate our ticket (after buying it) in a machine on the station, not on the train. We got off two stops after we got on, to validate our tickets, and then had to wait 20 minutes in the freezing cold for the next train. When we finally got into the city we got off at Marienplatz, which is just outside the Rathaus (Town Hall) where the famous Glockenspiel is.

We happened to be there at 11am when it went off, but it sounded very sick, and it took a long time for the figures to move - we wandered off, deciding it needed some work!

We started our morning by going to the Fire Department Museum where Tim saw lots of exciting things (he used to be in the NSW Rural Fire Service). Then we walked back to the main shopping area where the crowds were becoming enormous (the sales were on).

Then we found our way down one of the most expensive shopping streets to the Egyptian Antiquities Museum where Tim went berserk taking lots of photos for school (he teaches Ancient History). A selection of the photos are below.

After the museum we did some shopping, and barged through the crowds from shop to shop. There were lots of lions around the place (in the same vein as the Berlin Bears) all decorated in themes and colours. I don't know what the significance of them were. I have included the photo of the lion below specifically because Tasmania is missing (those poor Tasmanians have no home yet again).

When we had finally had enough we caught the train back (once we'd found the right platform to catch it from), except we got on a train going to Starnberg, which is the right direction, but one stop before ours. So we ended up waiting on Starnberg station (once again in the freezing cold) for 20 minutes for the next train to take us one more stop. There were some ambos taking a youngish girl away on a stretcher when we got to Starnberg - we don't know what happened.

Once we finally got to Possenhofen, as we walked from the station to the youth hostel we speculated about how many guests in total would be at the youth hostel that night. I guessed 10, Tim guessed 6. When we saw the carpark, it was only our car and the guy on staff's (who we had nicknamed Otto). When we went for dinner Otto told us that it was just us!

After dinner we retired to the 'bistro' in the hope that Otto might serve us some drinks, but he nicked off. So we went into the conference room next door to the bistro, where there was a tv, and watched telly all evening - even an episode of Inspector Rex that we hadn't seen before (though unfortunately without the subtitles that SBS obliges me with)!

Freiburg - Possenhofen

There was a heavy frost overnight. The regulation 2 bread rolls must have been used up for the week as there was only sliced bread left this morning.

We left by the wrong road but got a nice photo of the sun breaking through the clouds over the mountains and a very frosty field, before we turned back to get to the right road.

The sun was out for the morning as we travelled through the mountains (in the Black Forest) through the ski resort of Feldberg. It looked to be a good day for skiing - clear and sunny.

Just as we headed out of the skiing areas it clouded over and we moved into mist. We missed a turn off, but made it onto the right road eventually. We stopped for morning tea at a roadhouse at about 12 (no Avon convention this time) where I used a loo that had a wacky seat-cleaning thing. Driving on, we stopped for lunch at about 2pm (a lot of roadhouses have enormous eat-in sections where you can order just about anything you like, from roast dinners, to fish and chips), and then continued on. We passed a bad accident just before we stopped for lunch, where a woman had slammed into the side rail, but amazingly appeared unhurt though the car was completely smashed.

We finally made it to Possenhofen by 4pm, only to discover that reception wasn't open until 5pm! We waited around in the ultra modern youth hostel until the staff turned up and then we booked in. Dinner was at 6pm and we attempted to do a load of washing (which for some reason took about 2 hours) and then sat in the bistro, once again waiting for the staff to turn up, while the clothes hopefully dried in the dryer.

Possenhofen is a small town famous for being the home of the castle where 'Sissi', Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, spent her youth. It was also home to Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl before she died. We chose to stay at the youth hostel in Possenhofen as a setting out point for day trips to Munich - we didn't want to stay in Munich itself. Our first choice was the youth hostel in Dachau, as we had stayed there on our last trip to Germany, but it was closed over that period.