I remember watching a movie when I was a kid called Defending Your Life with Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks. Albert Brooks annoys the hell out of me and the movie was probably a B minus at best. For those of you who do not know it centers around a man who dies, goes to a place called “Judgement City” (no not the affluent suburbs of west coast cities), and has to defend his life so that he can either move forward in the afterlife which I think means heaven or if he fails to go back down to earth to try it again. The key for someone to pass on is to show that they have been able to overcome fear and demonstrate courage in their life. I will leave it to you to find out what happens to Albert Brooks (besides his acting career).
Anyway if this were what really happens when you die then I definitely earned my ticket onward on Day 4. I am incredibly scared of heights even though I spend about 1/4th of my year in airplanes. Today we ventured to the Zugspitze mountain in Germany which is the highest point in the country. To get there you can either take a small train up OR take a ride in a 100 plus person cable car/floating death trap that climbs 10,000 feet in 10 minutes. I had done this once before about 10 years ago and remember spending the whole time sweating, grabbing ahold of the poled in the middle, and almost puking my bratwurst out.
They have made significant improvements (faster new cars and a lot larger) but it is still a scary ride. As you will see I was still white knuckled the whole way up as my children mocked me.
We made it up and our first stop was the bar where I downed a Weiss beir in about half the time the floating death trap makes its journey to the mountain top.
It was a beautiful day in Bavaria today. Sunny and cold. You can see in to several different countries from the peak including Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany (duh), and then a bunch of burg and stein countries that are barely bigger countries than San Francisco.
Being true Seahawks fans we wore our Seahawks jersey’s took off all of our coats and did a freezing picture at the top that we will try to submit to the Seahawks website for posting.
After spending about 90 minutes at the top and getting a snack we headed back down on the cable car (this time I was in the middle and spent the whole time talking to a couple from Ohio) and headed in to Garmisch-Partinkirchen.
We had a delicious Bavarian meal. I ordered the Schweinhaxe (pork knuckle) which is the sweaty meat you saw in the previous day. It is basically roasted pork with a skin that tasted like bacon. It was delicious. It came with a side of white cabbage salad (think coleslaw but with a vinegar base versus mayo) which was the best I think I have ever had.
The boys took a photo and got to see the restaurant their mom interned at before opening up a German restaurant back in the US.
We took a train ride back to Munich where we all feel alseep.
We had some snacks in the executive lounge and then watched 3 episodes of Unsolved Mysteries (the Robert Stack years) before going to sleep. Despite the years since these were filmed they still can be very scary. So as a good dad, we did our prayers and kissed my family goodnight as we all went to sleep scared shitless of murderers and aliens.
Richey's Travel Adventures 