Day 5 Augsburg

AUGSBURG (some pictures you may need to double click to "take in", overcast skies and the limitations of photo editing ...):

We opted for the town of Augsburg that Tuesday morning and it was fantastic.

The normal routine for us by now and I'll share with your our secrets. Ever the bargain hunter and horrified by the following ideas:

-sitting in Munich for 10 days touring museum after museum
-renting a car, including gas, daily parking and the rental fee ... close to $1000
-buying a eurorail (from the US, I knew it was cheaper that way), even the cheap pass $500 total for two people for ONLY 5 days of travel.

So I scoured the Internet and came across a gem. For 27 Euros, PER DAY and PER GROUP of up to FIVE people, you could travel anywhere all day long from 9AM to 3AM the following day. Holy Crap Mother of Awesome Bargains I hit the motherlode. This equates to $40 per day to ride any non high speed train anywhere within all of Bavaria, and all of Bavaria is MORE than you can do in 10 days. For equivalent travel we saved $600 over a car rental and $500 over the eurorail for 10 days of travel.

So every night that we wanted to travel the next day out of Munich we would hit the ticket ATM, buy our next day pass and the next morning we'd grab breakfast and take the subway 1 stop to this HUGE main station. The main station, Hauptbahnof had 36 tracks of regional and high speed trains, just below was the S-Bahn with another 8 or so subway lines and next door was another connection to the U-Bahn with another 8 or so lines. Going into the Hauptbahnof, for some reason, made me think of the train station in Harry Potter. Go figure.

Today? Augsburg.

-located on the Romantic Road, one of the many towns on this tour we visited
-founded by the Roman Emperor Augustus more than 2,000 years ago
-Bavaria's 3rd largest city
-on the conflux of the rivers Lech and Wertach
-Called the Venice of the North (though Brugges or Gent lays the same claim and I think they win hands down)

It certainly didn't feel like the 3rd largest city in Bavaria, in fact, compared to the bustle and commercialism of Munich it felt sort of like we felt in Brugges and Gent Belgium, which to this day we still adore. We quickly proceeded to the RathausPlatz, a term we'd become familiar with in city after city, normally the name applied to at least one of any town's central squares. There the Christmas Market was set up and the town took on a life of it's own. The cobblestone streets, the winding alleyways of merchant shop after merchant shop. The sights, sounds and smells of the holidays, not a sign of a bah humbug anywhere, we needed that, the holidays, let's face it, can really be a let down if your situation in life or family is not perfect or even close.

What can I say about Augsburg? For those who know Belgium, it had the charm of both Brugges and Gent but for different reasons, the bustle of the slightly larger Gent, the trolley systems and wires, and then the slower appeal of Brugges once you found the quieter parts of Augsburg. Given that E's dad enjoyed Gent more than Brugges I think he would have liked it there.

We visited the Markets, toured the streets, taking in the big picture of the town and the small details of the carvings, metal working and gorgeous buildings. The paint colors just don't come through due the overcast weather that seemed to follow us for so much of our trip.

On the train home, we passed by the same sights on the way up (of course), from the town of Kissing where E insisted we kiss (very sweet) to what can only be described as solar farms, farm fields filled with hundreds of large solar panels. The solar panels were an inspiration that depending on how things go we may look into for our own use to try to 'get off the grid' and save some money... after they get paid off of course.

Lastly, I didn't include a picture, but E bought this HUGE bag of cookies and sugar concoctions, it was about half as tall and wide as our backpack but just as wide sideways... we were on overload by the time we rolled out of the station and gave up soon afterwards.

Tomorrow, Day 6, I think it's Ingolstadt and Landshot.