I didn’t want to tempt the travel gods, so I didn’t plan on writing about day 25, the day we go home. So I won’t. Not that it was eventful - we woke up early, around 6:45 Munich time, and took trains and planes until we fell asleep in Austin at bedtime, around 4:30 Munich time. I got a stuffed bear hat, so that helped pass the time. But I will use this post to summarize the trip.

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Today, our last full day in Munich (and our last full day in Europe), we visited the Deutches Museum. That’s the museum that sits on the island in the river through town. It’s essentially a science and tech museum. Our AirBnB host, David Tennant, said it was a long museum. He was right. We got through only a fraction of it. I would recommend spending at least a full 8 hours there.

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We had no distinct plan for today, other than rest and take it easy. We slept in, played cards, played video games, and so forth until around one or so when we all left to go shopping. Generally when I travel I like to do a electronic-detox strategy, since I spend so much time connected in the rest of my life (being a programmer). This is why I’m highly unresponsive to e-mail (or however it is people try to contact me).

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I think either 21 days is the perfect length for a vacation, or I need to take a break at some point. Even Jason says I seem tired, and that’s the pot calling the kettle black. So while we’re all slowly going crazy, and having a great time doing it, a long time ago there was a king, King Ludwig, who through various political twists and turns in the mid-to-late-1800s had and lost political power.

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I saw a postcard today that was of a buxom lady, framed on her chest, holding a beer in one hand and a pretzel in the other. I felt like it decently well summarized the day. The beer comes from when we went to the beer garden for lunch and the haufbierhouse for dinner/afternoon snack. They served pretzels at both of these locations. The boobs, of course, come from the unusually high number of erotic shops we walked by.

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Surprising nobody, when we got up at 10 in the morning we were all exhausted. I was so exhausted I slept in until 10. Checkout was at 11, so I had an hour to shower and pack. Everyone was groggy. As we were walking out the door, Vittoria (our host) stopped by with her dog, Floyd, and all of our worries were washed away. Floyd truly was the most adorable little dog, and was so excited that we pet him and he even seemed to want to come with us.

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We’ve started to fray at the edges. Everyone’s been super troopers for the whole trip, but we’re tired. We’ve been going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 since Montreux, often for reasons outside our control (taking a wrong turn, getting the wrong fuel, having a long drive anyway). So we tried to sleep in. We really did. Jason succeeded, and slept until 2 in the afternoon. I don’t sleep in, but that’s okay, I got some time to sit on a couch upstairs and catch up on blog posts (all the ones from when we got to Montreux to when we got to Verona were written that morning - hence the irregular schedule).

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And not that chintzy California wine country, either. Italian wine country, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Or something. The drive was uneventful. In the morning Dad and I got up early (parking got expensive at 9, so we left at 8:15) to fetch the van and drive it to the street in front of the flat so it would be easier to load the bags. Navigating the narrow streets was, as before, difficult but not technically impossible.

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Today was supposed to be a full day in Florence, but that was scrapped because we didn’t make it to Florence, only as far Pisa. Today we finished the journey and settle with an afternoon in Florence. We started off the day with Ellen and Dad going to get the replacement car. It wasn’t really a replacement car so much as a replacement van. It seated nine, in a three-by-three configuration, and was outfitted like a professional van (as opposed to our previous luxury car).

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I am, over and over, glad that we as a family can keep a cool head in the most stressful of situations. We don’t complain, we don’t whine, we just keep a level head and find the best possible path forward. Getting delayed in Frankfurt would have been terrible with small (or easily bored) children. That said, if I could go back in time one day, I would tell past self to jump out of the car and shout “that’s the wrong hose!

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