Munch day 1: lion, tigers and bears oh my

We've spent most of our time so far in big cities, with our "adventures" being contained mostly to things like trying to speak French or accidentally stumbling into the nudist park. Our first day in Munich, we ventured a little further into the woods.

After a long train ride and immediately running into Steven in the street right outside the train station, we decided to take the train out to Kloister Andechs, a monastery and brewery about an hour train ride outside of Munich. We planned on taking the train to the nearby town that afternoon, walking the pilgrimage route up to the monastery, enjoying the food and beer for a few hours and taking the bus back. It was an excellent plan that didn't work in the slightest.

We bought our train tickets right away...and then spent the next 45 minutes trying to figure out the train situation, which seemed to be that our train had derailed. They eventually restored train service and we arrived just in time to take the last bus up to the Kloister, rather than walking both ways. We successfully made it up, enjoyed the food and beer and beautiful view, and decided to start back down the pilgrimage route a little bit before sundown.

That's when we learned that most of the pilgrimage route is through the woods. We decided to follow the road rather than the thin little trail through the woods to make sure we didn't get lost, but the windy road still went through the dark woods-for about 7 km rather than the 2 or 3 we had thought. We were fortified with plenty of good German beer, but there's something about walking through the woods in Germany at night that couldn't help but remind me of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales-or, as Patrick occasionally started yelling when things started moving in the woods, "Lions and tigers and bears!" On the other hand, you saw more stars in the sky than I've seen in years.

We made it back safe, without twisted ankles and even walked up to the station just as a train pulled up-but I think next time we might try our pilgrimage a bit earlier!