A Nightmare of a Day But a Great Time at Oktoberfest

September 23, 2018

Walking into Oktoberfest

What should have been a quick and easy exit out of Italy with a brief stop in at Oktoberfest quickly turned into quite a nightmare of a day (with a few great highlights). The drive from Lago di Braies to Munich should take just under four hours. We were set to leave at 8:00, which would put us in right around noon for lunch and allow us to spend all afternoon at Oktoberfest. Witten threw the first wrench in that plan when she decided to throw a fit about letting me help her brush her teeth. We spent almost 30 minutes waiting for her to calm down and let me help. Her little temper tantrum didn’t throw off our schedule too much though, and we got onto the road at 8:30.

Getting through Austria was less than easy because, for whatever reason, there was a lot of traffic. Crossing the Austria-Germany border also took an exhorbitantly long time for no good reason at all. Things only got worse from there. By 1:00 p.m., were finally about an hour outside of Munich, when we stopped for a quick bathroom break at a highway rest stop. That’s when I learned a valuable lesson and must confess a certain degree of ignorance and stupidity. The car wouldn’t start after our bathroom break. We had plenty of gas and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. Like I told my dad, the only message that the car had given me was that I needed to add some blue washer fluid to the tank. Who knew that “AdBlu” didn’t mean washer fluid, but a clear liquid that diesel cars use? Or that European cars are designed to not start if the AdBlu falls below a certain level? I called the rental agency (Europcar) and spent far too long trying to explain where we were to a German that couldn’t understand my awful pronunciation of German places. He was sending a repair vehicle to help us and said that it would take at least 60-90 minutes to get there. As I was walking back to the car, frustrated with the ongoing delay caused by my stupidity, I found a German guy standing by my dad in the driver’s seat, doing something on his phone. I got in and, suddenly, the van started up again! Apparently this guy had a little diagnostic box that he had hooked up to the van and reset the “AdBlu” error message so that we could start the car. It was an amazing turn of luck!

We quickly started off toward the nearest gas station to get some AdBlu and my dad called Europcar back to tell them that we didn’t need the repair team after all. The Europcar guy wasn’t thrilled about what had happened because what the Good Samaritan did for us was “technically against the law.” Having learned my important lesson about diesel cars, we added enough AdBlu to get us to Munich and continued to trudge through the traffic going the same way as we were.

It was 3:00 p.m. by the time we finally got to the airport, but that wasn’t the end of our delays. We still got a bit turned around looking for the Airport Hilton, took a nice drive through some non-road areas around the hotel, found a gas station, and finally got the rental car returned. By 3:30, we were checked into the hotel, and by 4:00 we were on the S-Bahn into Munich. The train ride took about 50 minutes, at which point we stepped out onto the streets of Munich with throngs of people dressed in Lederhosen and Dirndel flocking to Theresienwiese (i.e., the fairgrounds). As we crossed the bridge out of the train station, there was a police van with bull horns blaring German music as the crowds walked by. The walk from Hackerbrücke to Theresienwiese took less than ten minutes, and then we were there! It was just as magnificent as I remembered, and as “state fair tacky.” Witten loved all of it, and we quickly got her a giant horse gingerbread cookie to wear around her neck.

At Oktoberfest

Our first stop was at the Paulaner tent. We found a table tucked back in the corner of one of the boxes and got a big pretzel, but then spent 30 minutes trying to get one of the beer maid’s attention to get drinks. The frustration finally became unbearable and I set of to (successfully) procure us a table in the middle of everything. By that time, however, it was 5:15 and we were told that Witten had to leave the tent by 6:00 p.m. We each got a mass, downed them, listened to some great renditions of American classics (Country Road, Sweet Caroline,Will You Be My Girl), met a lovely Australian couple, and saw some drunkards get kicked out of the tent before leaving to walk past “Pass Out Hill” and get some food. We grabbed some bratwursts from one of the many food stalls, along with some candied macadamia nuts and then headed on to find another Biergarten. We settled at Spaten for another mass and narrowly prevented a hooligan from stealing Kati’s full beer while she ran Witten to the bathroom. So ended our evening at Oktoberfest, but not our night in Munich.

One of my mom’s high school classmates - Louis Nebelsick - lives in Munich and we called him to meet up for some dinner. We met Louis outside of the Hotel Senator and then rushed over to Augustiner Braü München in an effort to escape the impending storm. Louis is the quintessential professorial type, showing up a little frazzled, donning a black button up with a Tweety-Bird tie, and a European-style hat that looked a bit like a pork pie. The food at Augustiner (schnitzel and sausages) was great, as was the beer. Louis ordered everything for us in perfect German, including a “ladies beer” (i.e., a Hefeweizen) for Kati. Louis is a fascinating guy. He spent seven years working in Transylvania, is a professor in Warsaw, lives in Munich, and is about to start a dig in Como. We had a blast talking to him and, on top of all of it, the the table behind us was also American. One of the guys was from New Orleans and his wife was from Kentucky. She went to UK, but had three older sisters who all went to the University of Louisville, so was prohibited from wearing blue or cheering for the Cats.

At 9:15, it was still pouring down rain so Louis put us in a cab headed to the Ostbahnhof station. We got on the S1 to the airport, which should have taken just over an hour. At 10:20, however, we found ourselves standing on the Moosach platform filled with people, but no train. There had been some announcement in German and then everyone was required to get off of the train. We waited ten minutes for the next train to the airport, only to see the same thing happen again. This time, however, I talked to one of the S-Bahn workers that got off of the second train and he told me that the trains were terminating there because there was a power line down from the storm and that line wasn’t running any further.

By this time, two young girls from Gettysburg College that were studying abroad - one in Rome and the other in southern France - had kind of latched onto us because they were trying to make a 6:00 a.m. flight out the next morning so that they could get to classes on Monday. It was still pouring down rain, so I ran into a nearby hotel and asked if they could help us get a taxi. When they said that they could, I went back and our whole entourage fled to the hotel as well. The taxi company, however, would not send a taxi for us because they didn’t have any taxis equipped with car seats and wouldn’t pick up a baby without one. He suggested that we take the U-Bahn back into the city and try to catch the S8 to the airport instead. We did just that, taking the S3 back to Marienplatz and then switching to the S8 for the long ride back to the airport. We finally got back to the hotel around 12:30 a.m. and needed to immediately go to sleep. Witten, however, was so overtired (she hadn’t taken a nap or slept at all) that she refused to sleep in her crib and insisted on sleeping with us . . . and, somehow, taking up the whole bed! It was a long day and a long night, but we still had a really great time in Munich.