So what happened?
Catching up with our friend Paul one night in Berlin for dinner & drinks proved a bit of a catalyst. Fringe and Oktoberfest somehow came up in conversation, and we mentioned that we were not doing either. My recollection, slightly hazy mind you, is that Paul expressed some incredulity that we weren't going to Oktoberfest; Sasha mentioned that she really wanted to go but we couldn't really spare the money, and I mentioned that maybe we could stretch to do one of those two trips and maybe it was worth having another look at Oktoberfest. Some time later we had another look at it, but demurred again as the accommodation side in particular really was not looking good.
What really changed things was two events. The first? getting paid at the end of August, and finding we had a bit more of a cash surplus than we expected - this was due to finding a permanent place to live in Berlin and not having to have money floating around in bonds. The second? Air Berlin, the airline we flew to Oktoberfest last time on and a few other places since, declared insolvency in the middle of August. This latter point may seem a bit unrelated but the German Government stepped in to keep the airline funded and flying until the end of October, at the end of the crucial busy holiday/tourist season. This meant two things - people didn't want to book with an insolvent airline; but they were guaranteed to fly until the Government funding stopped at the end of October. Net result - airfares on Air Berlin became cheap. This did not solve the accommodation issue, but I had discovered an outfit called Stoke Travel which were running trips similar to the Topdeck trip we went to the first Oktoberfest with, where you do a trip on a bus, stay in a tent and then go back home on a bus (wherever your home is - London, Barcelona, Rome etc). Aside from the tours, they were also offering the chance to book the tents without the tour part. In itself, this was not necessarily cheap, but was by far the cheapest way considering it was during Oktoberfest time - we'd get a 2-person tent to ourselves but would also be provided with breakfast and dinner at the campground each night, and there would be the fact that there would be atmosphere at the campground and maybe we'd make some friends to go into Oktoberfest with. It would be roughing it - but we've done it once before. A flight on Friday morning as opposed to Friday night was much cheaper also - and since I had some time-in-lieu days up my sleeve from working at a work event, I could use one to take the Friday off. Just on 3 weeks out from the trip, and for considerably less than what it had looked to cost earlier, we had found a way to make it possible. We were going, to our third Oktoberfest!
Day 1 - Getting into It
Day 2 - Taking it Easier!
But, in the end, we did - we went into one of the tents we hadn't been to before which was serving Löwenbrau and sat in the beer garden for a stein, and ended up doing a bit of crowd watching - it became interesting to spot who were locals and who were tourists, the local's outfits were of a much higher standard and luckily, ours were not too distinguishable from those! Afterwards we had a wander, ate some fish bites and chips to eat from a stall in the grounds, and ended up heading to the Kaiserschmarrn tent for "dessert" - one of the few tents which didn't do beer, but was instead about the food. Specifically they do Kaiserschmarrn, or "Emperor's Pancakes" which is an Austrian delicacy. We shared one between us, and were stonkered by the end of it - so good though! We even managed to bump into Sam & Steven just randomly in the throng of the Oktoberfest crowds!
Day 3 - Oide to Paulaner
Summing Up
Particularly different for us this visit was to visit the Oide Weisn and have the beer our of the older style ceramic Steins, which was quite nice; and to visit some of the small wheat beer tents, which didn't have much room and only served wheat beer in 500ml glasses instead of the 1L Steins the Festbier was being served in. Wheat beer seems to affect me more than normal beer as it is, and maybe this is something that happens to everyone, hence the smaller glasses? But it was a nice change and German wheat beer is among my favourite beers (if not actually my favourite) anyway. I don't believe there is much we have not covered at Oktoberfest now - apart from maybe the Tapping of the Keg, or Closing Weekend since we have always ended up going to the middle weekend when everything is in full swing and not winding down. I think we can conclusively say, we've done Oktoberfest and then some! and yet we've never managed to ruin ourselves at it, although this was the first time I woke up with a sore head and had to let the beer come back up in the middle of the night. Worse for wear, I might have been (for a while) - but ruined I was not.
As for the campground that made our trip feasible - it sufficed, it worked out well but while we were there it became apparent to me that we hadn't really thought it all the way through. Mostly this was in relation to the weather - we knew it might get cold (although we didn't bank on it getting as cold as it did) but at no stage did we consider what it might be like if it were to rain. This would have been disastrous to say the least - the ground outside the tents was already compacted mud with no grass from having been heavily trampled on, if it had rained it would have quickly turned liquid and there would have been nothing to stop it from being spread on clothes and within the tent itself, save leaving shoes outside but even then that would have ruined the shoes. It did actually rain during the week after we were there in Munich, so we were lucky. The campground itself was well provisioned but incredibly busy, the included food was good but the crowds of people it attracted mostly were those in their late teens to early 20's, all in fairly largish groups, with a lot of Americans and Canadians - which was interesting considering the company running it, Stoke Travel are a NZ-based outfit. We did not exactly gel with the crowd at the campground and preferred to do our own thing. A lot of people were more interested in "getting wasted" than socialising at the campground (which is in contrast to the Oktoberfest grounds where no one really gets "wasted"), or looking the part but not really getting involved with it all - more just a token "We're there all dressed up ok that's done when can we move on". We're probably just a bit too old for some of that and some of that is not our scene either, but I really like the way we've done Oktoberfest - just take it relatively quiet, enjoy it and socialise. We also never managed to figure out if the campground we were in was the same one as we stayed in the first time we did Oktoberfest - it seemed possible, maybe even likely, but we would have been at completely opposite ends of the campground and when we went investigating we couldn't find the Topdeck area (if it was even there). So mystery unsolved on that one.
For now, our Lederhosen and Dirndls are retired but will be kept as souvenirs - and who knows, may even see a future use if we ever make it back to this side of the world around Oktoberfest time. I suspect this will not be our last ever visit to Oktoberfest, but it is most definitely our last visit for a long time. If anyone were to ask me what the most fun thing I did during my time in Europe was, I'm not sure Oktoberfest would be *the* thing, but it would certainly be up there. We will always have our memories, our photos, our outfits and our Steins to remember our Oktoberfest visits with, and will forever wonder what Little Joe and Shazza got up to after they absconded from the first Oktoberfest. Not to mention the surprise of waking up the next morning and finding one more black line on your arm from the sharpie than you remembered you'd had - which was the reason for the sharpie, to keep tabs of how much you drank! Great times, great memories but definitely there will be great times and great memories of different kinds to be had in the future and a wide variety of other things! So to that, I say Prost!