It always makes me sad to say goodbye to Italy, my favorite country, but it had to be done. So we flew from Catania, Sicily to Milano and from Milano to Munich. The transit was slightly different than expected, because our scheduled 3 hour layover shrunk to two hours and those 2 hour were filled with a surprise: our suitcases were not shipped through to Munich and instead of just transferring to the next gate, we had to pick up our suitcases, check them in and go through security again. Sounds easy, but we would never have been able to do this without that young lady from the wheelchair sevice who ran us from place to place, chasing people out of the way with “Permesso” “Permesso”, using secret elevators and non-public hallways to hurry us to our second plane!

That plane had another surprise: it was filled with testosterone! Packed full with young Italian guys with fresh haircuts, the newest Armani T-shirts and show-off tattoos, ready to hit Oktoberfest! ‘It’s the season again! On the plane they checked out fresh meat on tinder to hopefully have a great weekend in Monaco (which is the Italian word for Munich, which is the English word for München)

A third surprise was the weather: Sicily treated us with 28 degrees Celsius and sunshine, Munich provided a grim 11 degrees and rain 🥴

Surprise #4 (and the last one of that day) was that my brother Jürgen picked us up at the airport! He is the best!!!

Together with his wife Anja they whipped up a party the next day with delicious cake (baked by my niece Tamara) and pizza, with almost the complete Schneider-Clan present! It was a lot of fun, despite the almost melted plastic salad bowl that was parked in the oven while preheating for the pizza. This was an unfortunate hiccup, but we still had a lot of fun! I love my family! And they already found a reason for the next party: Ted’s names day on October 13th🤩!

And today we’ll be on the road again! Next destination: Bodenmais in the Bavarian Forest. We’ll spend a week at a wellness hotel with my mom and her partner Helmut. The weather forecast doesn’t look very promising, but my knee is looking forward to the swimming pools and massages there! It looks like we need a vacation from vacationing 🤪