Kicking it Old School

View of the Alps out the plane window

Awhile back, for funsies, I was checking out the prices of flights to certain areas around Europe, and I found that we could fly to Barcelona for the weekend for only 200 euro, total. We settled on 27-29 of January, and bought the tickets. Joe was worried we wouldn’t be able to bring luggage or be charged for it at the gate, and I assured him, no this wasn’t some janky airline, it was Spanair, a star-alliance member, and we would be fine.

To arrive at the airport in Munchen we had a couple options, one of which was parking the (rental) car there all weekend. We decided to call this plan B in case something went wrong, and take the train into Munchen instead. This enabled to walk to the train station and not have to pay to keep the car anywhere. So we bundled up into many layers, to be shed later in the warmer climes of Spain, and set out for the train station. 40 minutes and 3.5km later we arrived, very cold, but early.

Here in Germany, there is a train ticket called the lander-pass, which allows you to travel anywhere in your region, all day, for only 29 euro. We had plans to purchase one of these, but found an older woman who was also travelling to the airport and had already bought her ticket. We gave her 10 euro to tag along, and hopped a train to Freissing. Here we got off the train and waited in the cold for 10 minutes, before taking a bus to the Munchen airport, called Flughafen, incidentally my most favorite German word.

We checked into the flight, boarded and settled in for our 2 hour flight southwest. I fell asleep midflight, but suddenly woke up (fate) and looked out the window to see the snow covered peaks of the Alps. Most amazing view of them is from above, though maybe within, I haven’t tried that yet.

After landing, we obtained our Barcelona cards. I found these cards online, and they are quite handy. The main perk was transportation–this card can be used on all public transportation, and unlimited number of times, for a set number of days. We had a 3 day card, enabling us to get transport to and from the airport and within the city. In addition, there are discounts at museums, restaurants, spas, etc. across the city, as well as free passes to a select number of places.

We used the card to get to our hotel, riding first a bus from the airport terminal to the train terminal, a train to the metro station, and then a series of metro trains until the stop that we thought was closest to our hotel before walking the remaining 3 blocks. As it turned out there was a closer station, which we used in the future.