Landshut

After sleeping through lots of activity, we finally woke up around 9:30am. We ate some breakfast Andi left for us, got dressed, and headed over to the slackline festival. The event location was perfect: a large park filled with grass, and just enough trees to set up various slacklines on. And there were about 40 of them set up, of lengths varying from 4m to 120m. Then there were a few strange lines set up: a round steel cable, that I did not even try to get on, a short free style line (not tight at all), which I could stand on for just a few seconds, and a line which had some chain for its middle section. The last wasn’t as bad as it sounded, but definitely very weird.

In general all the slacklines were set much tighter than I am used to. They use “flat webbing” here instead the tubular webbing I use at home. It stretches less, and bounces less too. This increased tightness means it’s actually possible to jump, so I did my first slackline jump. I got about 1 inch of air, and didn’t stick it, but it was fun. I mainly focused on walking some of the longer (for me) lines. I managed pretty well to walk a 40 meter line, which is a lot further than the 10 meters I usually set up.

The day during the event was very relaxing. We just sat around in the park watching people do some amazing tricks, slacklined a bit ourselves, and talked to some of the many people that were there. Lucky for us, most Germans (and the Austrians who showed up in large numbers) speak English quite well. (Germans are definitely better and more eager English speakers than the French.)

At night everybody went to a biergarten. This wasn’t as much fun for us, since even though the people were nice, it was mostly a gathering of people who all knew each other already, and were speaking a language that we can’t follow. So we just sat together being tired, while my digestive system acted up a bit. Again, Andi needed to go home early and offered to take us with him. Everybody else continued partying on the banks of the Isar river. When we got home, the door was locked and Andi’s key didn’t work. Some cursing later, he called Bernie who had the other key that weekend. Luckily Bernie arrived relatively quickly, and his key worked. We hit the couch again.

The next day was even more relaxed than the previous one. For one, almost everybody slept in, and we had a relaxed breakfast in Andi’s “castle.” Fresh coffee was even hand-ground. Then we went to a park just outside Landshut. It has a nice lake, and lots of grass and trees. It was busy with all manner of Germans, wearing anything from lederhosen to nothing at all. Lots of people had brought lawn chairs, ice chests, but no boom boxes.

When we got there some people had already set up a few slacklines, and we dumped our stuff in the grass there and basically didn’t move all day. We did go on a brief walk to see the 60m slackline set up over water (and watched several people fall in) but I didn’t try it myself. We also went for a swim in the lake, which wasn’t warm. It was (obviously) very different from swimming in the ocean. Easier, and less exciting.

Again, this day I did some slacklining and we talked to a few people. It was very nice and relaxing. I started practicing to get on the slackline from an “arms-straight” position along with Veronica. With some pointers from Tom, I managed to do it a few times later in the afternoon, so that was my triumph of the day. Then it was time to take the train back to Munich where we had booked a hostel. Andi drove us to the train. We had a few minutes to repack, and then the train arrived, exactly on time. Thanks Andi and everybody else we met, for a great weekend.

On the train we sat across a very talkative religious socialist German lady with a fine command of the English language. We heard all about her son-in-law who was deported to Ghana, and she also told us what the good deals on train and underground transport are. That was actually very helpful. It seems the Deutsche Bundesbahn will happily sell you a 50-euro ticket if a 27-euro ticket exists which will provide you with the same (and more) service. The train time flew by and happy, but tired, we arrived (again) in Munich.