Bratwurst & beers in the Viktualienmarkt Biergarten: a good start to our week in Munich. There’s plenty to do exploring the old town historic district, including the magnificent Residenz palace, home for several hundred years of Bavarian royalty until after WWI.
With excellent weather we frequently returned to strolling along the Isar River, a lively scene for both locals and tourists as our visit coincided with a Sunday (when basically everything is closed) and a public holiday. Jacob also had a blast at the Hellabrunn Zoo and Deutsche Museum while Dave and I biked all over the English Gardens, Munich’s Central Park.
Since we prefer Airbnb/VRBO rentals to hotels so that we can have separate bedrooms for us and Jacob (family suites are pretty rare in Europe), I must say our booking skills are pretty good after several years of traveling this way, including Dave’s keen eye for family-friendly markers and reading in-between the lines of reviews. So though we’ve had pretty good accommodations in all our stops on this trip, we had the best yet in Munich. Our spacious and modern VRBO (with no shared walls/neighbors, ground floor access, and an outdoor patio, a holy trinity in these cities) was in a peaceful yet plentiful family-friendly neighborhood with a junction of bakeries, cafes, restaurants, grocery, and best of all, a robust playground scene. On the Corpus Christi public holiday last Thursday, we got to see how some Munichers spend their leisure time: rounds of Aperol spritzes and cute picnic spreads while dozens of munchkins bounce around the playground.
In planning this itinerary we recalled how much we enjoyed our travel in northern Germany (Berlin and Dresden) as well as several other European cities when Jacob was 3 months old – more on Baby EuroTrip 2019 in another post. In addition to Munich city activities, there are a few essential day trips in the region, of which we did two very different but meaningful ones: Dachau Concentration Camp and the Bavarian Castles of Linderhof and Neuschwanstein (will post about these day trips separately, as they deserve).
