Our last night in Munich took us to a local beer garden for some dinner - the menu mainly contained pork based products and they only served beer by the litre. James had the most delicious pork knuckle (I opted for pork belly) all washed down with a litre stein of their finest beer. About half way through my litre, I gave up, although politely asked the waiter if I could keep the stein as a momento (actually Steve the Canadian had been after one and we thought he'd appreciate it. Glad he did as it wouldn't have fitted in either of our bags!). Much to our delight, the waiter said - "do what you have to do, I haven't seen anything"…luckily we had a bag with us and off we clunked back to the hostel for our last night.

So, off to Stuttgart, our final stop as a two-some! Only a few hours on the train and we arrived, both feeling a bit exhausted - probably after our epic day of walking the day before (nothing at all to do with the beer, I'm sure). We checked into our room and basically napped for the rest of the day. Rising only to go and do some shopping and have an early evening drink (only the one!). After some dinner and an early night, we prepared ourselves for the usual one day city missions the next day.

Feeling refreshed, we headed in search of 'rubble hill'. The area called the Birkenkopf is an artificial hill made out of 1.4 million cubic metres of rubble created as a result of the bombings in WW2 - this amounted to about 45% of inner city Stuttgart. Over the coming years, all of the rubble was shifted to create what is now a monument which provides stunning views over the whole of the city. It's not the easiest to find though (odd as it's the highest point - but there were a lot of trees!) and ended up walking for about 45 minutes in a big circle in the wrong direction. Most of the hill is now grass, trees and a road, so we were a little underwhelmed at the amount of rubble on show. Nevertheless, it was still quit humbling to some of the bits of stone with the carvings and wondering where they came from.

After working our way back to the apartment for a bit of lunch, we planned our route to the Mercedes Benz museum. On the way there, James guessed that there was a local match on due to the number of football shirts he saw…we didn't realise though that the stadium and the museum were in fact basically next door to each other! Myself, having never been near a major football ground on match day was quite in awe of the police presence and the ponies - even so, we both wondered whether or not to see if we could get a ticket for the match instead! Walking past the stadium was incredible, the noise already coming from inside the grounds even though the match hadn't kicked off! We gave it a miss and went up to the museum (seemed like we were the only ones not going to the match!). As museums go, it was alright actually, aside from the cars, they have a huge amount of history in there - I think James and I expected a little bit more from it though. We managed to spend a few hours in there and before we knew it, we were done. Checking the time, we decided to hot foot it back to the station to avoid being sucked up in the mass of people exiting the stadium. As we walked past, the police were readying more ponies and kitting up. We could almost taste the tension seeping out of the stadium. Not knowing exactly when the match was going to finish, we stepped up a gear and got back to the metro station, only to find that they'd shut it! We were directed to another one about 1km away, so off we went - making a mental note to look up who Stuttgart were playing and what the result was.

…I think we were both glad not to have gone in to watch the match. Stuttgart were playing Eintract Frankfurt…and they lost 4-1…

Our host had randomly given us a bottle of German fizzy, so with a healthy dinner, we celebrated our last night as a two-some and congratulated ourselves on not killing each other yet! Neither of us can believe we're soon going to be beginning our journey back to the UK. Next stop though, Karsten's in Germany (although basically Luxembourg!) for a few nights. Midweek we trek down through France to see Deli and the boys, then on Sunday, the long journey back to Engleterre on the Eurostar.