No sleeping in today. This morning’s rise and shine is a brutal 5:30 AM. We have an early flight from Geneva to Brussels to catch. Thanks to the free public transportation cards that were part of our hotel stay we’re able to catch a train at the train station that drops us off at the airport. I should point out how amazingly lucky we've been with public transportation in Geneva. Everytime we want to go somewhere we figure out what tram or train number we need to catch, look up, and that tram or train is just waiting there for us about to leave. That’s how it worked again this morning.
The Brussels airport is very nice indeed. Dawn comments that this must be the airport that other airports are built in the image of. It’s clean, quiet, busy but not crowded. Our luck sours a bit when we get to the Munich airport though. Dawn has booked us into the Novatel which claims to be an “airport hotel” so we naively start looking for signs for it when we get off the plane…. Eventually I didn't so much find signs for the hotel but clues as where I might want to go to search for the next clue about it’s location. Eventually we end up outside waiting for a bus to shuttle us there THAT WE HAD TO PAY FOR. When the magic bus we needed finally did show up it wasn't even parked in the location that the clue said it would be. After a short ride we were dumped off near the long term parking for the Munich airport. Now I ask you, does that count as an airport hotel? What logic is there in I need a hotel AND long term parking? It’s stupid and I’m tired and that’s not a great first impression Munich Novatel.
The room itself is pretty nice. After we check in we have to turn around and leave to try and catch a train to Munich city center. There is a museum that Dawn wants to visit that closes at 5:00 and we wasted an hour trying to find our “convenient” airport hotel. The train station is a short walk and it’s another 40 minute train ride to get to Munich proper. All of our public transportation luck must have been used up in Geneva because there is also construction going on the necessitates that we get off at an earlier station and change lines...which just adds more time onto the trip. By the time we get to Munich it’s just before 4:00. By the time we find the Deutsches Museum it’s about 4:05…. we now have less than an hour. Due to tight schedules we've have to barnstorm more than one museum on this trip. We gird our loins and prepare to appreciate this place on a deadline. The ticket people just wave us in without paying because it’s so close to closing. According to wikipedia the Deutsches Museum is the world’s largest science and technology museum. This place is huge spanning multiple buildings and locations. Fortunately the exhibits that Dawn wants to see are up front in the building we’re currently in so we plow right into them. The contain all of the early steam engines, turbines, and electrical generators. The rooms are awash in gleaming brass, and copper, and in muted iron and steel. They are very very cool. The museum is huge so we aren't able to cover all the ground in our 50 minutes, but we see what we came for and have a good time.
After getting kicked out of the museum we walk through a park along the river for about an hour. The weather is of course perfect and we have a nice relaxing stroll. Eventually our thoughts turn towards dinner. We stop at one or two cafe’s but the menus don’t really catch our eye. We finally decide to grab a beer and regroup. At that point we realize that Dawn found a really promising place to eat in our Munich guide book and it’s not that far of a walk from where we currently are. We head that direction and visit Wirtshause in der Au that specialized in Bavarian home cooking. Dumplings in particular. 
The place is packed so we can’t eat inside. Fortunately they have a bunch of outdoor seating… but the clouds look threatening. We decide to risk getting rained on. We order two dishes. One is a dumpling sampler that comes with dumplings three ways. The other is a pork and duck dish that comes with yet another type of dumpling. All the dumplings are excellent. The duck leg is also very good. The pork was bit dry for my tastes. Towards the end of our meal it starts to rain...but it never really gets going. We’re able to finish our meal without having to break out an umbrella. On our walk back to the train station the weather holds out until we duck into the underground portion. By the time we get off the train by the airport it’s done raining. We’ve had the best luck with weather so far.
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