Day Trippin

As of this coming Thursday I'll have been in Munich for a month. We're pretty settled into our routines at this point, but it seems we're still settling into our apartment. I'm writing this from our living room which is a bit of a jumble. When we arrived it had a couch, two normal chairs, two weird chairs that are like pool deck chairs but on rockers, and a hammock (don't really know why there's a hammock in the living room, but it's here). Since then we have brought in the patio table and chairs to use as a dining table (the huge dining room table is in Lily's room and is too big to move it out) and a futon which is about four feet from the TV which is where it needs to be since the TV screen is literally the size of my laptop screen. We don't have any real complaints, it's just quirky.

Our routines are basically this. On weekdays I hop on the train and head to work, Nicole and Lily do some kind of touristy outing in the morning then come home for lunch and naptime, then out for errands or a short jaunt. I usually come home a bit early because I have evening phone meetings a couple of nights a week. Since I'm heading to an office Nicole hasn't seen and she and Lily are off visiting places I've never seen, it kind of feels like we're living dual lives here, but at least we have weekends to share some good experiences. And Nicole and Lily are planning on coming out to the office for lunch one day this week, so that should be fun.

For weekend days we get out of the city and do day trips as much as we can. We've done this twice now, and I'll give you our photo tour...

First we went to a strange amusement park in Wolfratshausen called Marchenwald. It's centered around the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, and there are a bunch of animatronic sets around the park to recount the (oddly morbid and disturbing) tales. There were also a bunch of random rides, most of which Lily could do, a few of which she loved.

Here she is riding the miniature train through the forest. Three notes: 1) the "what the heck is going on here" look on her face. This would be a theme for the day. 2) the pictures from this day were shot on my cell phone, so the quality isn't so good. 3) we got there early and it was cold, so we had the place almost to ourselves for a while.

She LOVED these cars, we probably rode this six times.
I don't know why I find this one so hilarious, but I do.


After the park we drove over to Chiemsee (see = lake), and the sun came out so we could see foothills of the Austrian Alps as we drove. We also walked around a quaint town next to the lake called Prien. This pic is in the town square.


Ok, so that was last weekend... this weekend we started Saturday at an animal park, sort of an overgrown petting zoo. Lily enjoyed checking out the different animals, and she said afterwards that "ee-aw" was her favorite - the donkey. Here are a couple of shots from there.

Then we were going to drive to Tergensee but wanted to give Lily an opportunity for a longer nap plus the weather wasn't great so we drove down into Austria. The clouds opened up a bit and the scenery was amazing. We were driving along a long lake with sort of rolling hills/mountains on the other side, really beautiful. On the way back to Munich we stopped in what our book said was possibly the most prototypical Bavarian town, Neubeuern. A nice town square with one lane town gates and a castle on the cliff above the town. We hung out in the town center for a while admiring the flower boxes and murals painted on the buildings. We managed to get a nice self-pic too.

Then we noticed that the small statue on the water fountain at the center of town had a little quirk. Here he is.

I'll leave you with that one. Until next time...