Cruising Erding-Albany
By Lothar. Filed in General, Germany |
On Saturday, February 23rd, we stay in the Mercure Hotel München Airport in Aufkirchen. This is the most laid-back and quiet Airport Hotel, we have ever stayed in. There is no road traffic to speak of and no airplanes can be heard or spotted in the sky, but it will take only 20 minutes to get to the Munich Airport the next morning.
We meet Ditta and Uwe and spend a nice afternoon and evening together. Dinner is traditional Bavarian in the “Erdinger Weissbräu”,
brewery of “The World’s Most Famous Weissbier”. Their website teaches you, how to correctly pour the beer into the appropriate glass.
Erdinger wheat beers are brewed using their own water, which has been there since the last Ice Age and is being pumped up from the rock bed 157 meters under the surface. Beers are still being brewed in accordance with the Bavarian Purity Law from 1516, probably the oldest food law in the world.
The next morning, we are up at 6 AM and drive through the foggy countryside to the airport. We witness the sunrise and the sun is melting away the fog, and with it our worries about flight delays. Take-off in Munich is at 10:15 in the morning, and our flight path takes us over Nürnberg, Bremen, the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea near Stavanger, the Shetland Islands, Faeroe Islands to Iceland. It is sunny and I have great views of Iceland’s snow-covered mountains and fjords. We continue cruising at 36000 FT.(10972m) over the Denmark Strait to Greenland and reach North America over Baffin Island. I continue to have nice vistas of the Hudson Strait, Hudson Bay and Lake Huron. The further south we come, the more signs of Human habitation become visible. Lake Michigan is only frozen along the shore line and we land in sunny(!) Chicago. The Gods are with us today : no canceled flights and smooth sailing to Albany.
We arrive at home 18 hours after leaving Erding in Bavaria, and already I am thinking about how I can go back to some of those places which I have only seen from 36000 feet high.