Our last day in Munich turned out to be quite a roller coaster.
We started with a lovely breakfast in our hotel and then caught a train to the town of Herrshing on the Amersee Lake. Our goal was the Andechs brewery and monastery. We followed some little signs and enjoyed a challenging hike through the forest for about two hours. It was lovely – aside from the mosquitos.
We enjoyed some amazing beer and lunch at the brewery and decided to walk back to the train.
We followed a different path on the way back and it only took about 45 minutes. We ended up on the shores of the lake and saw three separate wedding parties.
After returning to our hotel we enojoyed a bad movie and started packing. Our goal for the evening was to enjoy a local beer festival. As we were leaving it was starting to rain. Kelly went back up to our room to get a rain jacket and we stood on the sidewalk trying to decide if we neede an umbrella or not. One of the hotel employees came out and stood next to us. Tracy joked with him that he needed to make the rain stop for us. He promptly told us that we shouldn’t leave and walk in the direction we intended because their was a shooting.
We still had wifi and took a quick look at the news – we promptly decided to have a drink in the bar of our hotel. As we were waiting for our drinks the seriousness of the situation started to sink in. A few minutes later we saw hundreds of people running out of the train station across the street.
Our bartender told us we should return to our room so we went back upstairs. We got back to our room in time to see the swat teams and police vans arrive outside the station. We watched as more people evacuated and police did security patrols. We turned on our one English station – BBC and got on social media to let everyone at home know we were safe.
Everything has been crazy – the hotel lobby and bar is full of people who are stuck in the city without public transit available. We wandered down to the restaurant to try and get dinner and after being told the kitchen was closed early we resolved to get a bottle of wine from the bar and have a dinner of granola bars in our room. As we were heading back upstairs one of the waiters flagged us down. They allowed us to come in and have dinner since we are hotel desks. It was a difficult dinner as the restaurant staff was constantly telling people they were closed and had nothing to offer people as we sat and enjoyed a meal.
We were so grateful to the staff for feeding us and thanked them profusely.
Kelly had the second half of what turned out to be a really big dinner boxed and she gave it to a nice guy who was hanging out on the stairs up to our room. We had chatted with him earlier and he was stuck in our hotel waiting for his girlfriend who was supposed to arrive on a train but was stuck somewhere else. He was grateful and said he had spoken to her and that she was ok.
We are headed to the airport in just a few hours and have managed to get everything packed. It has been a difficult evening – the faces of everyone in the hotel shows the stress of the situation. They all just want to go home but are frightened to be outside – many are stuck and probably just want to sit and get in touch with family. It has been a difficult thing to watch and we are sad this happened in a city we love so much.