Knight Moves

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Most aspiring adventurers often get their starts in conventional settings. While the exoticism of India, or the orientalism of Japan can be very enticing, the settings themselves are often very challenging for the inexperienced traveler. And so many travelers have their humble beginnings in Europe, with its concentration of culture, relatively small distances and its comprehensive transportation web. While there are those that beat the common path from city to city, experiencing museum fatigue and hostel burnout, there are also those that seek something a little off the beaten path. I had started my first trip to Europe off well in this manner. I had started across the Mediterranean in northern Africa, traversed Sicily and then visited oft forgotten Malta. After getting as far north as Rome though, I was trapped in the same backpackers’ route as everyone else.
One thing that had interested me as I had started to travel, and which many other travelers take advantage of to give their trips an edge, is to stay in hostels set in interesting buildings. Already on my journey I had stayed in a Tunisian palace, an Italian villa, and a hostel in the shadows of the Alps. I still yearned to stay in a castle though, yet my itinerary consisted only of cities and I therefore assumed a stay in a castle would be impossible, assuming that such a hostel would be only in the middle of the countryside somewhere. Not so as it turned out. I had been relatively superstitious about not researching a new destination until I was sure to be heading there, especially after so early on in my trip my plans changed almost daily. So it was that as I was researching Munich on a train in southern Bavaria that I found my castle. In a distant suburb, in what used to be a separate town before urbanization had swept across Europe, was a hostel located in a former castle. Arriving late on a Sunday I made my way to the southern reaches of Bavaria’s capital and finally my castle experience began.
I had planned to stay there for four days and until halfway, my experience had been fairly sedate. On Tuesday after returning from the Dachau Concentration Camp I found that my room had been given away to a group of six Japanese students who were intent on sharing the same room. This turned out to not be such a big deal. Earlier in the week they had done a similar thing to another traveler and he was given a double, which was now going to be a two person dorm room. Upon out first meeting I found that my new roommate was a fairly spirited and extremely nationalistic individual from south-western Germany. He suggested that I go out drinking with him that night, but my day of walking around in the cold, not to mention my fairly tight budget, had caught up with me. I promised him to go later in the week and then promptly went to sleep.
No longer able to postpone our meeting, I headed out with him two nights later and I discovered his drinking plans were thankfully not very ambitious. Drunken revelry was not his concern, rather the hostel’s midnight curfew. This plan was working fine until we got to the nearby pub and found an interesting group of people from Berlin. Always eager to practice my basic German and to meet new people, the time started to get away from me. My friend who became enraptured in some jingoistic talk was similarly distracted.
Looking down at my watch I saw that it was a quarter to midnight and I knew that we would never make it back in time. But with a chilly night on the street as our only alternative, we decided we should at least try to get in before looking elsewhere. And so the two of us transformed from simple backpackers into knights trying to storm this small castle. We started by wooing the lady of the castle, which really consisted of convincing an exchange student from the USA to let us into the courtyard. Next we breached the walls, which was accomplished as my colleague climbed through an unlocked window with my assistance. And finally, as with any great military plan, we used deception, as my fellow knight played dumb and told the proprietors that he didn’t know how I had gotten locked outside.
As it was, after all this drama, that about half past midnight we were both safely in our beds. The next day I was off again as the next stop on my multi-city tour beckoned. But if only for a moment I had lived the fantasy of many small boys, playing make-belief, in a life-sized castle.

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