2020 - Day 3: NightJet and a long drive to Bayerisch Eisenstein

The summation of today is we made it here!

Not long after writing yesterday’s blog it was lights out, and whist I wouldn’t say it was a brilliant night’s sleep on a train travelling up to 160 km/h, we all slept through the shunting in Nuremburg and made it to just before 7am as the train continued to head south east towards Munich and eventually over the Austrian border to Innsbruck.  With our final destination of Bayerisch Eisenstein, had we been travelling without the car, leaving the train at either Nuremburg or Munich would have been much more practical than continuing on to Innsbruck, but the only option with the car is end-to-end so with the train already booked from when we originally planned to stay within Austria we had to make the decision a few weeks back whether to cancel the train and drive all the way across Germany, or take the train to Innsbruck and then drive back into Germany to Bayerisch Eisenstein from there.  As you would have worked out by now we decided to stick with the train and whilst the total driving time wasn’t massively less, it did remove the need for a night in a hotel and also replaced kilometre after kilometre of Autobahn with a scenic drive up and through the Brandenberg Alps.

Back to the NightJet experience it all went relatively well.  There are three different levels of travel available and we opted for the middle Couchette tier with a private compartment.  In day mode the compartment resembles a classic British Railways carriage from the 1980s with two bench seats either side of a table, but when converted to night mode the seats transform into two sets of three bunks.  At the moment COVID-19 restrictions enforce that only family groups can share a compartment, but normally there would have been an expectation for us to pay a surcharge for a private space to avoid having two other strangers paired with us.  It was perfectly fine for us as a family of two adults and two young kids, but we couldn’t imagine having two other people, let alone strangers, sharing the space.  The Couchettes come with shared toilet and washroom facilities, but for those wanting a more luxurious experience en suite sleeper cabins are available, but these come at a cost premium (they also have a maximum limit of three people, so we would have had to have booked two cabins).  At the other end of the scale there are standard seated coaches, the real budget option for a 12-hour overnight journey!

The S-Max survived the journey to Innsbruck.

Our arrival into Innsbruck was delayed by a little over half an hour which according to ÖBB was due to some engineering works on the German rail network (it’s not just the British train operating companies that like to blame someone else), but relatively quickly the car transporter wagons were shunted over to the unloading ramp and we were back on the road.  The first part of the drive was the most scenic, driving up through the mountains and passing a number of lakes with beautiful blue water that really doesn’t seem natural to someone more accustomed to seeing the River Thames!  

Scenic views on the drive.

After a little hold up on the Munich equivalent to the M25 (if only we could have got off the train here six hours earlier), we made it to our stop off to break up the drive, a small dinosaur museum in the town of Taufkirchen.  We now have two budding palaeontologists in the family and both Forrest and Paloma enjoyed seeing the fossils and also the model dinosaurs in the museum gardens.  Whilst not as large as some other dinosaur museums that we’ve visited, Urzeitmuseum - Sammlung Kapustin was just right for what we needed today and the family ticket at €18 was well priced.

Psittacosaurus baby - Photo by Forrest.

Megalodon - Photo by Forrest.

Deinonychus (the real Velociraptors from Jurassic Park) - Photo by Forrest.

Cub and the dinosaurs.

So it was back in the car and onwards to our base for the week ahead in Bayerisch Eisenstein.  We are staying in a holiday home that is a large house that has been split into a number of self-contained self-catering apartments with use of a communal garden.  Our friends from the Czech Republic are staying in the same house so it was nice for the kids to play and the adults to start to catch up. After all the planning, replanning and rejigging it is great to finally actually be here.

Home for the next week.

Blogged by Matt.