It has been too long since I had something (interesting) to write about on here, just due to how the world has been in the last few years, meaning since 2020. With everything going on, and my private life undergoing (so to speak) a lot of changes in the last couple of years, I didn’t really leave the city I live in all that much. Yeah, there were occasional short trips here and there, but nothing special. Since this blog, at first, was meant to contain more travel type content than anything else, with me not travelling around as much as I had planned, unfortunately, I didn’t have any of that sort of content to post. But, it’s time to get back into it now!
Let’s take things back about a year or so. I got invited to a friend’s wedding in Colorado, USA, and at first I was super excited about it and made plans to finally “pull the plug”, and make a trip to the USA happen for myself. Unfortunately, as I mentioned a few rows higher, my life changed quite drastically exactly a year ago, and with that, the expense of the whole trip proved to be a bit too much for my financial situation at the time. And that meant that, sadly, I had to decline the invitation and shift my focus elsewhere. It wasn’t until about half a year ago that an idea came to mind, or rather was presented to me, to attend an event that I was quite interested in even before, but with that idea, everything just became even more appealing. And that event is the Sim Racing Expo.
The Sim Racing Expo is an event where all things sim racing come together, for that one weekend at least. I’ve heard stories about the previous expos, and naturally, being involved with sim racing more and more, I wanted to go see what the event looks like for myself. The expo is being held in Dortmund this year, and of course, with the help (meaning: convincing :D) of some friends, I decided to actually plan everything and attend the expo. But that is not the only thing that’s going to be happening over the next 10 days or so! I’m not going to go into more detail about that just yet, so you’re going to have to keep following the blog and my adventure, as I said in the title of this post!
With getting to know many people through sim racing, some of them I raced with just a couple of times, others, I’ve really become good friends with, we decided to do the trip together. Yeah, it is true that most of them are from the UK, and me being from Slovenia makes a slight difference, but when it came to planning the whole thing, I came up with a nice little trip to get to Dortmund first of all. After looking at all the possible means of transport to get there, also taking into account the second part of this “adventure”, nothing really made as much sense as taking a bus to Munich first, spending the night and then continue onwards by train, to Dortmund. At first, I was looking at how much all of it would cost me, but at the end of the day, I can already say that it was well worth it! When one compares the money that would have been spent on a plane ticket, and getting to the airport, and seeing how much I will have paid for the way I chose to go about it, you kind of get to the same point. The only difference being, that if I decided to fly directly to Dortmund, I would have skipped this first day of my trip, which has been quite incredible!
To be honest, it hasn’t really been a day with a lot of things happening, as I spent about 6 hours on the road, getting to Munich itself. As mentioned, I decided to take the bus, FlixBus to be precise, as it was the cheapest option. With the optional seat choice, I paid 17 euros for the trip, which doesn’t seem all that bad to me!
So my day began in Ljubljana, and I left the city at around 10 in the morning. The drive to Munich was nothing special, I’ve driven that way many times before, but being a bit older now, seeing things with different eyes, it gives you a new way of looking at the whole thing. The bus itself wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything exciting either. Let’s just say that I was a little disappointed, but considering the fact how much I paid, it was decent. I mean, it’s not like if I would have paid more that it would have made a huge difference, but it’s easier to live with it when you don’t spend that much money. So we arrive to Munich around 3:30 in the afternoon, and the first thing, of course, was to get to my hotel and leave my stuff, to be able to wander around “worry free”. Spoiler alert – it was not completely worry free, at least for the first few minutes. 😀
I am staying at the Stachus Hotel, close to the main train station, which is supposed to be right next to the bus station as well. Well, it takes me about 5mins to get to the train station from the hotel, it took me 20(!) minutes to get from where the bus dropped us off. Like I said- not worry free – but we’re not done yet! After sorting everything out at the hotel, I decided to go and buy a day public transport ticket, even though I needed it only for a few hours, but better safe than sorry with these things. It cost me 8.8 euros, and I can say that the transportation system here is just as good as in Berlin, which I really really liked! I wasn’t sure about the whole process of buying and validating the ticket, I managed to buy it with no major issues, but I wasn’t sure whether I had to validate it still, and where/how to do it. Luckily for me, someone bought a ticket a few seconds after me, and I’ve been shown how to do it, so I validated my ticket and off I went.
Some might think why am I bothering myself with that kind of things, but that’s just what I’m like. Especially at such a big city that I haven’t been to before, and being here by myself. And with that, I’m going to finish this post, it’s already looking super long, but we haven’t gotten to the most important part of the day yet. Like I said, there will be a lot of posts coming your way these next few days, maybe not every day, but I’ll give it my best!
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