Krause Travels

September travel in Europe is the best, and while this trip is mostly about moving bicycles from Germany to France, we’re taking advantage of the cooler weather and smaller crowds to revisit a few places we toured last year.

Munich

We’ve been here several times, but there’s always something new to experience. This time it’s Nymphenburg Castle, the summer residence of Bavarian royalty from the seventeenth century to the present.

The Kleine Rose

If the people you meet along the way are some of a trip’s best memories, the waiter/bartender and chef at the Kleine Rose restaurant surely qualify. They kindly speak English with us about differing customs, and we learn several small but useful facts:

• Beer foam is cultural. Ask for a Helles (German lager) in Munich and you’ll get a head of foam on the top. That is unless the bartender knows you’re Australian or American. Apparently we’re known for liking our beer glasses filled with beer, so a good bartender will make sure to top off the glass and leave off the foam.
• Beer foam is a style. Ask for a schnitt, and you’ll get half foam/half beer.
• Beer and wine are carefully measured and the amount is marked on the glass. You’re always going to get what you pay for in Germany.
• Beer is a rite of passage. German kids start drinking beer with their parents at home around age 14, and, according to our waiter, “Beer doesn’t really count as alcohol.”
• Watermelon is fruit for a cultural exchange moment. Kleine Rose is a Greek restaurant known for serving a little extra plate of something seasonal at the end of a meal. In September it’s watermelon, and they ask if we want lemon on it. Lemon? We say okay and decide it’s good. We ask if they’ve ever tried it with salt like we do back home. Salt? They’re skeptical, but they try it and decide it’s not too bad.

Olympic Village

We’ve never been to the Olympic village, site of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games, but after seeing the movie September 5 about the hostage crisis that happened during the games, we go hoping to learn more about it, but we don’t find any indication the event ever happened. Still, it’s worth a visit. There’s a beautiful park with cycling and walking paths, a concrete version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame around a serene lake, and the indoor Olympic swimming pools which are open to the public and where you can have a drink at the cafe and watch swimmers do laps.

Walk, Eat, Drink

Food and drink walking tours are some of our favorite ways to see a city, so we take advantage whenever we can. We’ve had good luck with Secret Food Tours which you can book via various travel apps. You learn a lot about a city’s history as you walk from one food and drink stop to the next, as well as the history of the food and drink you’re sampling.

Regensburg

Regensburg is a beautiful small city on the Danube River about an hour and a half’s train ride north of Munich. This is where we’ve had our bikes stored for the past year.

We revisit a few places while we’re here and finally have a chance to try the bratwurst sandwich the Wurstkuchl Restaurant has made famous. Not only are the sausages delicious but they serve takeaway from what is purported to be the oldest continuously serving restaurant in the world, having first opened in 1146.