Munich to Verona

Our train ride from Munich to Verona is one of our longest, at almost 6 hours. We intended to take a night train for this one, allowing us to spend the whole day in Munich, until we heard that this would also be the most beautiful train ride we'd be taking.

We still spent about half our day in Munich, hitting a few last stops. We intended to go to the BMW Museum, but missed seeing that the museum was closed on Monday. We saw their showfloor with all the fancy cars, but then ended up with a little bit of extra time and decided to go back to Oktoberfest to see a little more.

Oktoberfest is MUCH more reasonable on Mondays than on the opening Saturday (surprise, surprise) and we walked right into a tent and even found a place to sit down pretty quickly. I'm glad we went back; there was no way we would have made it into a tent when we went on Saturday, and the tents were pretty cool. The decorations were bright and festive, the music was fun and it was much easier to get our beer and food! We only got to sit for an hour or so, but it was good to see.

The train ride to Verona was, as promised, beautiful. We were surprised at how different the Alps look between Germany/Austria and Italy; once we crossed into Italy, they got much softer and greener. We arrived in Verona late and walked to our hotel through the late night dinner crowd. (We also stopped for "dinner": our first gelato of the evening. Gelato for dinner is amazing.) I love arriving in most cities in the evening. Train rides are one of the few times I have felt homesick, as 6 hours of slight motion sickness makes you miss normal life. But when we arrive in a new city at night and walk to our hotel, that all evaporates as we pass by new landmarks and through beautiful streets that we can get excited to find again and identify in the daylight the next day. Verona in the evening is absolutely beautiful. It's a clean city that looks like everything you would imagine Italy to be, and is far less hectic than Venice or Rome has turned out to be.