Driving & Drinking in Germany. 

(But Not at the Same Time). 

After we left Vaduz, we immediately crossed the river Rhine (one of Europe's largest rivers) back into Switzerland where we stayed ever so briefly before crossing back over the Rhine into Austria, where we spent all of twenty minutes before we entered Germany for the first time. During our jaunts around Europe, we’d be spending a lot of time driving back and forth across Germany, and for me, that was good news. You see, Germany has the Autobahn.

Autobahn

When I was a kid, the Autobahn was this mythical road in a faraway land where there was no speed limit. And now, I was finally on it. After a short period of disbelief about being able to really drive as fast as I wanted, I did just that. It’s quite fun — and quite effective at making those kilometers fly by. Before too long we were in Freising.

Weihenstephan Brewery

The main reason I wanted to visit Freising is that it's home to the Weihenstephan Brewery. Fortunately, we got into town and settled into our hotel in time to make the short drive up Weihenstephan hill so we could try some of these famous beers in the restaurant attached to the brewery.

Side note: this was also where we had the grumpiest waiter we’ve had on the trip yet. As of this writing, he’s leading contender for World’s Grumpiest Waiter (spoiler alert: he won).

The Weihenstephan Monastery was founded by Saint Corbinian in 725 and was thought to have been making beer as early as 768. But it was in 1040 when the monks got a license from the city of Freising to make and sell beer, and that makes it the oldest still-operating brewery in the world. The beers, of course, are quite excellent.

We would have toured the brewery proper, but it was the weekend and the tours weren't available, so there’s not much else to say about our visit here.

I was going to combine this post with our visit to Dachau, our other main outing in the Freising area. But that was such a massively less joyful experience than visiting a brewery, so they really needed to be separate.

But I will say that after visiting Dachau, we returned to Weihenstephan one more time for some much-needed relief.