We pick up the story of my/our trip to Germany on the morning of our return journey. On the way there, we decided to take the train to Munich overnight, and then continue onwards from there the same morning. And I’m not going to lie, it was tiring, even for me. For the way back though, we decided to take a break in Munich, spend the night in a hotel, take the next day to explore the city and then hop on the train to Ljubljana. Looking back at it now, it might not have been the best decision, but we couldn’t have known that a month prior, when we were deciding on it.
The journey from Leer to Munich was separated into 2 train rides again, the first taking us to Frankfurt and the other train taking us the rest of the way. At least that was the initial plan. But as you might have guessed, things didn’t really go according to plan at all! The beginning of the return journey was absolutely normal, the train even arrived slightly earlier than expected, and we left the station pretty much on time. That was important to us because we only had 18 minutes to get off that train in Frankfurt and get to the correct platform for the next part. With 29 platforms, Frankfurt’s train station is among the biggest in Europe in that regard, with 179 million passengers passing through it each year, so you can imagine that every minute there counts. Luckily, I’ve been to the station a couple of times in the past already, so I know the layout and felt comfortable with those 18 minutes being enough to catch that second train.
Unfortunately, that was the only good part of that whole excursion. About halfway through our nearly 6 hour ride, our train suddenly came to a halt due to a technical issue. I still have no idea what exactly happened, but it delayed the arrival to Frankfurt by an hour, which meant that we already knew we were going to miss the connecting train. The problem with it was that at first, I thought the hotel I booked for the night, was only open until 10pm, according to their information on Booking, but thankfully the reception desk is open 24h at the hotel, so after getting that confirmation from the hotel, I did relax just a tiny bit.
I kept checking the DB (German railways) app for alternatives that we had on offer, but there was so much confusion with that as well. The day before, That part of Germany got hit by huge thunderstorms and everything was affected by that, railways weren’t an exception either, so there were huge delays that even continued into the day when we were travelling. Our first train, which was supposed to get us to Frankfurt, unfortunately had to end its journey at an earlier stop, just one stop before our final destination, apparently because of too much trains coming in and out of Frankfurt that if at all possible, they rerouted any possible train from going into the city. All of us had to get off, and there was a train supposedly going to Frankfurt about 35 minutes later. Yeah, that wasn’t really the case.
The train in question just took us one stop closer to Frankfurt, not all the way there, as it was said. So after even more confusion, we had to find another connection to get us there, with time running out to catch yet another alternative for a train to Munich. When I chose the alternative, the app said we will have roughly 12 minutes between our scheduled time of arrival and the departure, which was still doable. But as we were approaching the station, that time kept going down all the time, and by the time we got there, it was down to practically a couple of minutes. We got pretty lucky right after stepping off the train that I noticed the stairs right next to us, taking us under the platforms and we near enough ran to the correct one and jumped on the train we wanted to get on. Not even a minute later the doors behind us closed and we were on our way towards Munich.
The whole journey that day took roughly 13 hours, most of them being pretty nerve wracking, but at the end of the day we arrived to Munich 2 hours later than it was initially planned, got to the hotel and after getting some dinner, I basically fell asleep again as soon as I jumped in the bed. The train ride back home to Ljubljana from Munich was pretty uneventful actually, because I did get some more sleep so it was over quicker than expected, and there’s not much to say about it. There’s still one part of it all that I haven’t said a word about yet, and that is the day we spent in Munich, but that will come up in the next days as well!
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