On Friday we headed down to the Bavarian Alps with Heather, Anya, and Anya's friend Janie, who was in town for a visit as well. The trip down was interesting - we managed to narrowly avoid Janie getting fined for riding without a valid ticket and then another (more hefty) fine for misusing a Bayern Ticket. Thankfully, being resourceful and appearing dumb gets you pretty far.
After a 4 hour train ride and a quick bus ride, we ended up in Pfronten, a small resort town right on the northern edge of the Bavarian Alps. Right around the town there are a bunch of ruins of monasteries and castles perched on top of the mountains, so the plan was to go hike up and see one. Before we headed off, we decided to stop for lunch in a Biergarten, where we encountered a British gentleman who, though helpful at first, soon proved to be quite drunk and a bit lonely. After extracting ourselves from that situation, we wandered off in search of somewhere to hike. Unfortunately, at this point we realized that the train schedule was probably going to limit the extent of our hiking trip. We settled on a less ambitious hike but still managed to see quite a bit of the beautiful surroundings. After we got back to town we realized that we had misread our schedule and we actually had about 2 more hours than we had thought. By then it was pretty much too late and so we decided to just head back to Regensburg.
Here are some pictures of Pfronten:
Troy as navigator-in-chief
I didn't realize that goats don't have round pupils, which is creepy
The next day Troy and I headed over to Erlangen, a good sized town just outside Nuremberg. A friend of mine had tipped me off that they were holding a festival and I figured no trip to Bavaria is complete without experiencing that sort of spectacle. I ended up being rather surprised by the scale of it - Erlangen is about the size of Regensburg but there were a lot more people than I'd ever seen at our Dult.
Pictures:
The crowd - it got even worse later on
Dinner - Troy got a half of a chicken and a pretzel, i got the Bratwurst with potato salad.
This is Bruno, a guy who was having his bachelor party and was dragged on stage to sing drinking songs. His friends were wearing shirts that said "Bruno heiratet" (Bruno is getting married) and he is wearing a shirt that says "ich bin Bruno" (I'm Bruno).
Troy and I grinning like morons after 2 maßes each
Sunday we hiked over to Adlersberg, a little dorf about 6km outside Regensburg where they have a nice brewery and Biergarten. There is a nice walking trail that takes you there with a beautiful view of the countryside along the way. The walk is about 3 hours but thankfully one of the bus lines runs out there too so you dont have to walk back.
Here are some pictures I took the last time I went:
looking back towards Regensburg
The Donau
Monday I was pretty worn out and since it was a holiday, nothing was open so we didn't do too much.On Tuesday we headed back over to Nuremberg. We wandered around town, had lunch at a Biergarten (noticing a trend?), saw the castle, checked out the old Nazi rally grounds and then called it a day. I didnt take too may pictures since I had already seen most of Nuremberg.
Anyway, I'll cut this off here but before we go, here is a picture of a diner in the Munich airport called Smokey Joes:
