As with most things standby, things don’t always go as planned. First off, our intention of this trip was to get to Tunisia, then Malta, then possibly even Northern Spain. Whether any of that is about to happen is up to the standby gods. After all, we are now on a Lufthansa flight to Munich, so the most straightforward method of getting Tunisia via Paris was eliminated when an Air France flight from LAX got canceled — dumping all those now stranded passengers onto our original Delta flight to Paris instantly resulting in an oversold situation. So, the next best option was to fly to Munich on Lufthansa’s A380 which had over 140 open seats.
As spacious as that sounds, the aircraft seats in excess of 400 on its bottom deck alone with another 100 or so business class seats up top, so while there were empty seats, it wasn’t as vacant as the numbers may have implied. We were at least given a row to ourselves in row 86 (surprisingly not the last row of the plane). Now, the problem (or perhaps new opportunity to put a positive spin on this), is that there are not flights to Tunis everyday, or at convenient times, so my suggested solution was to relax in the Bavaria region for a few nights before continuing on. We will eat schnitzel, strudel, pretzel, würst, und maybe even trinkt some bier whilst frolicking in the fairytale lands of this region.
We arrived at LAX about an hour before departure time, and the Lufthansa desk had already closed down. We had already checked in (and had seats!) before arriving, so this wasn’t too much of an issue. Passports and a biometric photo were enough to get through security and we ultimately boarded the plane with just biometrics, having never actually had a ticket. Luckily no one was in our seats because it would have taken some digging to prove that we belonged there.
The flight felt long, though we watched only one movie – Paddington in Peru. Not a wink was had during the flight, thanks in no small part to the trashy girls behind us who raised their shade in the middle of an overnight flight allowing bright sun to enter the entire cabin and wake everyone up. After finally touching down in Munich (firmly I might add), it took us a while to exit the airport. Perhaps Southern Germany is like the southern U.S. — a little bit less efficient and backward.
We finally exited the airport, picked up our Kia Ceed hatchback from Hertz and immediately hit extremely bad traffic. For nearly an hour, we barely exceeded 10km per hour. It turned an otherwise short journey into what became an almost three hour crawl. We stopped at a rest stop along the way where I had intended to relieve my bladder, but they were charging one euro for the privilege and I decided to hold it. Upon finally arriving in the town of Füssen, I was on the verge of a breakdown. It had also been raining nearly nonstop since we arrived.
We had a mediocre dinner at nearby Beim Olivenbauer where I had some schnitzel and Nicole had a pizza. Exhausted, sore, stiff, defeated, and wet, we returned to our hotel in hopes of recovery for a more pleasant day tomorrow.
passports & pepto bismol 