Day 8 (travel to Nuremberg)

Today we overslept…again. We still made it in time for our train to Nuremberg. Train travel can be a little stressful. The equation goes something like this; destination arrival – train commute – connecting trains – walking time to train station – 30min buffer = time to leave. That is the easy part. It is the apps that are difficult to navigate. There are several different departure times and then you need to figure out how to buy the tickets. There have been many times that the purchase part of this problem did not happen. Well we made it around Berlin and to Nuremberg regardless.

We arrived at the train station in plenty of time for the train to Nuremberg. We have first class tickets through Europass. Unless you have a reserved seat you have to figure out which seats are already reserved. Yes, I have tried to figure that out but am not there yet. Today we rushed into the train (because they don’t wait) and grabbed 2 seats. This is where our seating lesson began. We were immediately schooled on which seats were reserved. On the sides of the seats show which legs the seat is reserved for. So don’t sit in those! There are 2 first class cars with lots of seats. All reserved, so you have to walk down the aisle like your from 4th class and look for a seat, if you have not figured out reservations yet. We found 3 quiet rooms with 6 opposing seats in each room. 2 of the rooms had people in them with luggage strewn out to discourage entrance. The 3rd room was empty so taking a lesson from the other two, we scattered our luggage to discourage entry. We must have missed something because 2 people forced their way in past our luggage and sat down. I even forced the malfunctioning door closed to make it harder to enter. No luck. A rather long legged man and woman made themselves at home. I sat across from Lurch. He sprawled his legs out in an exaggerated man spread encroaching on my space and activating my claustrophobic mental alarm. Lori never seems to be bothered by people in our space but she will bring it up between us. The room is a quiet room that is placarded with silence sticker. He must not have been able to read pictograms because he began rambling on his phone almost immediately. I leaned over to Lori to look for approval to point out the quiet sticker on the door. Her look said it all, NO INTERNATIONAL INCIDENTS!

We arrived at the Nuremberg train station after a 3 hr ride. Train stations are always located in a bad part of town. This station was really ornate and near what looked like some sort of castle. Lori worked her magic and got us a room next to a castle and within a 5 min walk to the train station. The plan was to only stay here for 1 night to see where the Nuremberg trials were. We were supposed to stay in Dachau tomorrow for a concentration camp and then travel to Munich Friday for the October Fest opener. Since the cost of this hotel was so cheap ($150/night) we decided to base out of here for a few more days.

We walked around this old, “cute”, castle village for a few hours. It is really nice and there are lots of restaurants, bars and shopping. Oh yea, churches and a castle on top of a hill. We plan on going to where the Nuremberg trials (where the Nazis were prosecuted) took place and then explore this walled village tomorrow. We ate at an Italian Restaurant, had some wine and walked back to the hotel. Nighty night.