The fat lady was starting to chirp and the holiday ending blues were kicking in (well for me anyway). With the cheap thrills of dining and dashing due to Germany’s hideously poor and slow service and free riding the train not hitting the spot, it was time to up-the-ante and end with a bang. How were we going to do this? Well, we hired a motorbike!

Now this was not as straightforward as it should have been but after numerous emails and phone calls it was on! The only issue was the weather looked a little bad buttttttttt it should be alright…right?!

We woke to car tyres squelching down the road and a quick look out the window confirmed we were in for a damp and foggy day. But we aren’t fair weather bikies and with my “bikie mole” in tow we were off to fetch our 125-horse power BMW R1200GS for the day.

With both of us fitted up and the GPS programmed we off dodging the morning Munich traffic, only to return the hire place 10 minutes later as the GPS wasn’t working. It was set to offline mode… Now I am a Google maps user so I forgave myself rather quickly for this oversight.

This was only my second ride on a motorbike since May after breaking my wrist and dislocating my shoulder but don’t worry I only broke my wrist from crashing my motorbike ;). As I was getting back into the rhythm of riding one of the struggles was making sure I stayed on the correct side of the road. All day I had my internal voice repeating ‘right side, right side’ and thankfully we didn’t have any issues. I never had this problem with Scarlett after my father said ‘ just keep Britt in the gutter’ and it worked for me. Britt did forget to keep me in the gutter once, that is when my internal right side voices became rather vocal!

We made quick work of the autobahn and we were out into the fresh country air, which the rain also helped with. We rode into this small German village on the footsteps of the German and Austrian Alps, our stomachs were in full song and that was the queue for lunch. We weren’t disappointed; it was typical Germany pub food with that small village touch. The customer service was decent and they accepted MasterCard! This was the first time we had received good service in Germany; we started to believe it didn’t existed. During this break Britt showed how much the rain had got her, she was drenched! I opened my mouth and said ‘I was drenched too but the heat from the engine dried me out.’ I quickly received one of Britt’s special glares and with that came the realisation that I should not have said anything. This was not the first time I should have kept my mouth shut this trip… #liveandlearn

With our content stomachs it was time to hit the road and the scenery did not disappoint. They winded between two lakes and climbed through the forest filled mountains that were a sea of orange, red, yellow and greens due to the autumn leaves. We had unofficially crossed the boarder into Austria and stopped again and this time next to a rapid filled river.

Here we tried to dry out Britt and her socks using the hot exhaust fumes and it worked to a degree. At this point we decided to start making our way back to Munich, with the only stipulation that we had to stop for coffee and cake.

Coffee and cake was found and the afternoon went off without a hitch accept for having to quickly avoid a truck as it took up the whole road through the winding hills. We made our way back on to the autobahn and it started to rain again and this time it was a lot heavier then it was in the morning. Knowing that Britt was getting drenched for the second time put a bit of a damper on the day but she didn’t complain and soldiered through. Rather impressive considering she actually left puddles of water through the hotel when we got back and quickly ran for the sauna to warm up. The only other time I’ve seen her move that fast is when she’s spied some cocker spaniels that she wanted to pat!

The day was capped off with some lovely Italian food and was great way to closeout a holiday that will never be forgotten.

Next post: Britt’s solo adventure begins!