Going home

May 7-8 – Munich/Sacramento/Concord

Guten Morgen Nate! (Good morning!)

We got up, had breakfast, checked out but left our bags at the front desk. We wanted to spend part of another day hanging around Salzburg. We crossed over the Salzach and strolled around that side of the town, had one final lunch at Demel’s, then returned to the hotel to pick up our bags.

We took a cab to the train station and waited on the platform for our train to Munich. One last chance to look at the mountains around Salzburg.

View from Salzburg train station


The trip to Munich took less than two hours (it’s only about 100 miles). At the main train station we connected to the S-Bahn (a kind of tram/subway train) out to the airport. We weren’t flying out just yet, but we’d decided to spend our last night out near the airport so we could get there early to catch our flight. The hotel was fairly new; all the hotels we had stayed in on this trip were in buildings at least 300 years old. It was almost like being home already. The hotel was in a little town near the airport called Schwaig-Oberding. Don took a walk around town and found a maypole.

Maypole (Schwaig-Oberding)Maypole detail (Schwaig-Oberding)

The maypole is a European tradition, especially strong in Bavaria. It is set up or decorated on May 1. Many maypoles, such as this one are decorated with representations of guilds, churches or businesses in the town. From the detail picture, you can see Schwaig-Oberding has a church, a farmer, a brewer, a builder, a woodworker, a car repair guy and someone who does tile floors.

After one more good Bavarian dinner at the hotel, we turned in for our last night’s sleep in Europe.

Thursday morning we checked out, and went to the airport in the hotel shuttle. Don took a shot of the check-in area at the airport.

Munich airport

Our plane was an hour late, but we finally took off in the early afternoon. On the flight home, we saw lots of fields of yellow. Don and Linda weren’t sure what they were, but they were pretty.

Fields in Germany

When we got to O’Hare airport in Chicago we were already late, with a tight connection to our flight to Sacramento. We had to: get off the plane, walk to immigration, clear immigration, wait for our bags, clear customs, had our bags back, take a shuttle to terminal B, clear customs, walk through the underground passageway (see first post) to terminal C, walk the length of terminal C to our gate, get on the plane. We JUST made it!

Four hours later we were in Sacramento, where we checked into the same hotel we stayed in before we left, and fell asleep. The next day we met Kris, Linda’s son at the University of California, Davis (near Sacramento), where he’s been accepted for the Fall term. They had an event for transfer students. It was interesting, but would have been more interesting if we hadn’t been jet-lagged again. Later that day we finally got home to Concord.

It was a really fun trip! I hope they take me again next time they go!

Goodbye for now – Your pal,

Flat Stanley

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