Getting it Together in Freising

We arrived at the Munich airport right on time, about 1400 on Saturday, after a stop in Reykjavik.  The big box that we packed the bike in looked worse for wear -- the bottom panel was torn off and at first we worried that maybe some parts had fallen out.  A quick inventory showed that we had everything that we'd started out with, so with some tape it looked like it would make it to the hotel.  We rolled everything out to the taxi stand and there was a huge Mercedes van taxi right in front of the queue of taxis.  He saw us coming!

We folded down the 3rd, 4th and maybe the 5th row of seats and the taped up box fit in nicely.

We were settled into our hotel in Freising, a small village just north of the Munich airport in no time at all.

Tired, we decided that we'd put the bike together on Sunday and go for a stroll around the village.  The big Euro cup game between Germany and Italy was Saturday night.  But the game started at 2100 and I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to make it that late.  So we walked around a bit and tried a beer from the local brewery, Weihenstephan.

Weihenstephan -- The oldest brewery in Germany

The beer was a good, drinkable summer lager.

By 2000 we were both ready to fall down (not from beer, just from tired), so we gave up on going to the watch the game and crashed.  But we heard the celebrating when Germany won 6 -5 on a tie breaker.  Maybe we can watch the Iceland v. France game on Sunday.

Sunday a.m. and the weather is beautiful.  After a hearty breakfast at the hotel we put the bike together.  We're getting good at it and had it fully functional in about 2 hours.  The garage was crazy hot, though, so pretty unpleasant working conditions.

Some assembly required...

There isn't a lot to do in Freising, so we decided to ride the Isarradweg (bike trail along the Isar river) to Munich, which is about 40 km away.  It was a nice path but got pretty crowded by the time we arrived in the huge, beautiful Munich park called the English Gardens.  Lots of families out enjoying the nice Sunday.

Big bubbles for the kids

We noticed a bunch of young people walking around with surfboards.  It looked odd, but soon enough we had our answer when we came to a standing wave park called the Eisbach surf area.  The surfers were really good and it made me think of the Bend Park & Rec.'s ongoing failures with making a standing wave.  Maybe they should send somebody to Munich to observe one that works really well.

Here's a video (if I can get it to load)...

We have another video that is better and which doesn't end with a shot of someone's butt, but the video was too big to load on the slow internet here...

We rode around Munich a bit, visited the Marienpltaz, then headed back to Frieising.  We took about a 10 km detour when we got totally turned around in the English Gardens and rode in a huge circle.  We decided to watch the GPS a bit more closely, as neither of us had noticed my apparent wrong turn.

Chinese Tower, English Gardens

Navigating the tandem, which is like an RV compared to other bikes, through all the strollers requires caution.

We will try to watch the game tonight, then we're on the road tomorrow to Inning Amarsee, which is about 80 km down the road, for our first night of camping.  GO ICELAND!!!