The Grumpy Schnitzel - My Summer in Europe

Hey everybody! So this will be my blog site while I’m over in Europe for the summer to help me document my travels and share my experiences. So far, I’ve been here for five days. I’ve been traveling around Bavaria so far, from the big cities that everyone’s heard of, to tiny villages that most Bavarians don’t even know exist. Here’s what’s happened so far.

I arrived Wednesday evening after 24 hours of travel and took Thursday to relax and get my bearings back. I spent the day mostly reacquainting myself with the small town my brother and his wife live in, Parsberg, Germany. I forgot how small it really is, but hey, there’s a castle view from the backyard.

On Friday, I took the train down to Regensburg to visit some friends. We went to an Irish pub of all places to watch the Portugal v. Brazil match. After that we headed to the Wursthaus to grab some sausages (that doesn’t sound right) and sauerkraut. We then headed to another pub and played some pool until it was time to catch the train back. Well, I ended up running to the train station to catch it, and oops, I forgot to purchase a ticket. While on the way home, the ticket lady was coming my way. I pretended to be asleep, and fortunately, she didn’t ‘wake’ me to check my ticket. Note: one side effect of pretending to be asleep after a few pints is that you actually fall asleep. Let’s just say, lesson learned. I woke up five minutes after my stop and had to take the train to the next town. Well…the next train back didn’t leave for another two hours. What was supposed to be a 25 minute train ride turned into a three hour tour. Unlike Gilligan and friends, however, I made it home. No coconut phone needed.

Saturday, my brother Nate, and his wife, Dawn, and their dog Osu, took the train down to Munich. I’ve been there before, but this time something happened that has never happened to me in Germany. I had great German food. No, really. The cool thing was that the restaurant we ate at was across the street from the opera house and the symphony was playing a free concert outside. Pretty good little Saturday lunch. We took some pictures, wandered the streets, went up in a church tower to check out the city, and then proceeded back to the train station. This time, we made it home on the first try (I’ll get the hang of it eventually on my own). We got back to the house just in time for the U.S. match which you all know, they lost. I guess I have to root for Germany from here on out.

Today was sort of another lazy day. We took a drive to another small town to take some pictures of old castle ruins and also I had to learn the route down to a park and ride that I’ll be headed to on Thursday to catch our flight to Amsterdam. I don’t know what goes on in that town, but I heard something about windmills and tulips is about all there is to do there ;).

There’s been some other things that I’ve been doing, but if this goes on too long, I’ll just start boring people. I’ll be updating the blog as I go along my adventure. In addition to traveling, I’m hoping to get a job CrossFit training here as well. I’m setting up a meeting tomorrow with a guy that could help me get this goal accomplished. I’ll let you know how it goes. For now, thanks for reading and auf wiedersehen!