President's Weekend in Munich: Why We Always Go Back

Mid-February in Bavaria isn't the postcard version, but pulling Ella out on Friday turns four days into five — and the city is warmer indoors than Newark.

By Anne Levine·

President's Weekend gets a bad rap as a travel weekend. Everyone hits the same ski mountains, the airfares feel punitive, and you come home tired in a way that doesn't feel like a vacation. We figured out years ago that the answer was to fly the opposite direction of every other family in our zip code: east, into the trough between Christmas markets and spring, when Munich is at its most local.

It's cold. Not pretty-cold, just cold. But the apartments are warm, the *Glühwein* is still being poured at the small *Stehausschank* counters even though the markets have packed up, and Brigitte's daughter has now spent enough time with Ella that they have an actual ongoing relationship — they pick up the same conversation they were having in November.

Pull Ella Out on Friday and It's Five Days

President's Day is Monday. NJ districts close Friday for staff development almost every year. That's a four-day weekend already. We add the Thursday before by emailing Ella's first-grade teacher in late January, asking nicely, and accepting whatever worksheet packet comes home. Five days off, $0 in babysitting, kids in their own beds Sunday before school resumes.

I'm not the loudest mom on this blog about pulling kids out — I'm careful with first grade specifically — but for a five-day window in February, with the worksheet packet emailed and a teacher who knows it's coming, the math works.

Mid-February Munich Is the Real Munich

The tourists are gone. The Christmas-market plywood is in storage. What's left is the city that lives there, which is the version I most like to show the kids. Some specifics from this year:

  • Augustiner-Keller, not Hofbräuhaus. I will die on this hill. Hofbräuhaus is fine. Augustiner-Keller is where you actually want to be at 5 PM on a Saturday with two kids and a fresh *Brez'n*.
  • The Deutsches Museum. Specifically the children's wing. We have lost three full afternoons here and would lose three more.
  • Viktualienmarkt. Even in February, even with stalls half-shuttered, it's a great loop with kids. Cheese vendor, pickle vendor, flower vendor, repeat.
  • The Tierpark Hellabrunn. Munich's zoo. February is a low-energy zoo day, which with a 4-year-old is a feature.

The Sunday Mittagessen at the Bauers

Frau Bauer texts me in late January every year asking what date we'll be in town for *Mittagessen*. I tell her, she names a Sunday, and that's it — there's no negotiating, there's just showing up at 12:30 PM to a table that has been set since the night before. She makes *Schweinebraten*. Herr Bauer pours Dave a beer he doesn't really want and Dave drinks it anyway.

Their youngest son — the one I nannied — is 24 now and lives in Berlin. He came down for our Sunday last year and brought Ella a small wooden whale. She still sleeps with it. The Bauers are not blood, but they are family in the way that decade-defining people get to be family.

What Brigitte's Daughter and Ella Have Going

Brigitte's daughter is 10. Ella is 6. On paper that's a gap that shouldn't work — a 10-year-old should not, by any reasonable expectation, have patience for a 6-year-old. But Ella has somehow earned it. She showed up speaking three German words and a lot of BTS choreography, and Brigitte's daughter taught her Dynamite in an afternoon, and now whenever we land they go straight to the bedroom, close the door, and emerge an hour later with some coordinated thing.

This is what the repeat trip pays you back in. The first time you go anywhere with kids, it's a vacation. The fifth time, your kid has a friend.

Practical Stuff

  • Lufthansa runs a Wednesday-night EWR-MUC that lands Thursday morning. Sleep on it.
  • Apartments in Schwabing or Bogenhausen are cheaper in February than they have any right to be.
  • Pack hats. Real hats. Munich February is not Paris February.
  • The S-Bahn runs from the airport to Hauptbahnhof and is faster and easier than a taxi 80% of the time. The kids treat it like a ride.
Dave once asked me if I'd be happy going somewhere new on President's Weekend. I thought about it for an honest minute and said no. He shrugged and booked Munich.

The Reading-on-Planes Year

One small thing about February-Munich that I love disproportionately: the flight is the rare time I read for pleasure. Dave has the laptop, the kids are asleep or watching something animated, and I have eight hours and an actual novel. I read three of them on the EWR-MUC route last year alone — it's become its own ritual. The flight back is for sleeping. The flight over is for whatever paperback is on the nightstand.

I mention this only because I think one of the underrated arguments for repeat-trip travel with kids is that the parents get to have their own version of the trip on top of the kids' version. Dave and I have a quiet dinner once per Munich visit at a small Italian place near the Friedensengel that we've been going to since the Bauers first sent us there ten years ago. Brigitte babysits. We walk home along the Isar. That's our trip. The kids have theirs.

I'm aware this is the same trip every February, more or less. That's the point. Repetition is what builds a relationship to a place, and I want my kids to have a relationship to a city, not a tour. They'll figure out what they want to do with it later. For now I'm content that Leo points at the airplane and says "Brigitte" and means "the place we're going."