time of your life

   


Though I actually love train travel (and even, in certain instances, bus travel) and in fact once spent 24 hours on trains going from Freiburg, Germany to Sibiu, Romania, I tried to ensure that my friend Ann and I never spent too much time in transit each day while we were traveling around Germany and Austria. I decided we'd stop in Augsburg for an afternoon to break up the otherwise five-hour journey from Rothenburg ob der Tauber to Prien am Chiemsee, because it was more-or-less at the halfway point, but also because our guidebook made Augsburg sound awesome. I believe there was a sentence about how Augsburg was "definitely worth a stop on the Romantic Road." We're talking high praise here.

And, well. Augsburg was fine. The sun was shining and the sky was mostly brilliant blue, and we sat outside and enjoyed a lovely pasta with Pfifferlinge (delicious orangey-tan long-stemmed mushrooms) and wandered around town (this takes maybe twenty minutes total) and went into both of the town's massive and beautiful Catholic churches and enjoyed some Kaffee und Kuchen outdoors, and it was good, nothing to complain about, except that we weren't quite sure what we were doing there in the first place. I mean, the guidebook talked about this place like it was something really special, and as far as we could tell it was just okay, but certainly not anyplace we would have thought twice about passing right on by had we known what it was like beforehand. It wasn't particularly cute or particularly large or particularly much of anything other than a generic mid-sized German city (although, according to Wikipedia, Augsburg does have "more legal holidays than any other region or city in Germany." -- I suppose that's something!).

We decided that the guidebook author must have had the best evening of his life in Augsburg, culminating in meeting his future wife. And if his wife's from there, hey! He certainly couldn't diss his wife's hometown in his Germany guidebook. But from the rest of us, who did not meet our German future significant others in Augsburg, let's go ahead and be clear: it's a perfectly okay place, but forgettable. I might even go so far as to say that a straight-through train ride to the Chiemsee would have been just fine.