Travelling Again - 2024
What can I say, I like to travel. I also like European football, so what could be a better combination than travelling to watch European football? And that’s exactly what we did.
This time we decided to do things a little differently to last to hopefully maximise how many games we could see and minimise the lengthy travelling in between games… First stop Munich!!
Now I am a fan of early mornings, but this was something else, we had to be at the airport so that we could be on the first flight out at 6am to Dubai which meant that we woke up at around 2:30am to get a taxi from my sisters place to the airport to give us enough time to check in and get to the flight. I’ve never been to the airport this early before but it was dead, which was good because there were no queues, but there was also limited stuff available to get breakfast and so on, oh well.
Traditionally we have always flown to London first via Singapore however I didn’t really have any desire to watch Premier League so we managed to find well priced flights with Emirates that would go direct to Munich, which initially I was happy that it was just a shorter flight but it also had the bonus of us not missing a day and the second flight wasn’t overly packed, I took this as a small win.
I don’t really have too much to say about the flights other than I would definitely fly Emirates again and I would definitely do the changeover in Dubai to fly directly to the European destination I wanted to go to rather than bugger around going to London, not that I don’t love London but just that it saves time.
So this ends up being the third winter holiday we’ve done to go and watch football, the first one got cut drastically short in 2020 due to COVID and then in 2023 we went back and pretty much saw all the games we wanted to see the first time (Munich, Paris, West Ham). This time it was all about Munich, and because of the ballot type system with the ticketing I didn’t find out till the last minute that I would get any tickets. This window works well for us because Munich had two games in 10 days so it made it worthwhile to try and make, coincidentally because of a big snow storm prior to Christmas it meant a postponed game would be played during the same time, so a chance to see 3 home games in the one trip.
As it turned out our stars aligned and in between some of the Munich matches we are able to squeeze in a game in Milan and a game in Torino (Juventus), where we could we would squeeze in some sightseeing, which at the time of writing think will be some days in Rome.
Our snowy walk to the hotel starts here… Besucherpark
So flights done we landed in Munich at around 7pm, so by time we got out of the airport let’s call it 8pm, and it was cold, like real cold, snow cold. For this trip we’d both bought new bags, these sexy new Antler ones which were great. The only problem was that they needed a code to open them and when we got to Munich airport to get my winter gear out I couldn’t unlock the code, I tried everything but none of the codes would work. After a small amount of panic and frustration I decided to just catch the train and walk to the hotel and try and figure it out then, which was okay except I left Sydney and it was 25 degrees so I wasn’t really dressed appropriately.
We got out of the train to walk to our hotel (we were rolling the standard Novotel near the airport) and made the very very cold walk through the field to the hotel, where we checked in and mad hour way to our room.
Celebrating the bag opening
After quickly making an espresso I decided to have another crack at my suitcase code. Sebastian and I would have a turn at doing 1 number at a time, 100 each and then swap. If we got to 999 and still didn’t have it unlocked we’d swap and do alternate 100’s. It really didn’t take that long, maybe 15 minutes before I struck it lucky somewhere in the 500’s. Now nowhere in the codes that I planned on using was there a 5, I’m going to say that someone was playing tricks on my but the good news was we got the bag opened and I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I have full access to my winter clothes the next day, because I sure would need them.
Michael