Our last day in Europe, and we buried our sadness at leaving with more pancakes. Breakfast may have momentarily sated our stomachs but not our anxiety. It was a familiar refrain: too much to see and too little time to see it. But despite our usual inclinations, we opted for a different tact. We knew we’d soon be flying home and, more than that, staring down 24 hours of hell once we landed: getting all our belongings out of temporary storage, dropping them off in the residence of our new tenant, flying to San Francisco, moving into an Airbnb, and starting a new life. In other words, we knew that we had to save our strength.

We spent our last two days in Europe the best way we knew how: eating. After sleeping off our midnight train arrival, we queued for breakfast pancakes, finally settling on savory and sweet to share: one made with Indonesian spices and the other Nutella and banana.

The gray day matched perfectly with our hangovers. Tom, our Airbnb host, gave a dull wave from the living room, his hair matted at obtuse angles. “Oktoberfest should really just be one day,” he admitted, sitting in his underwear, and I suspected this wasn’t the first time he had this epiphany. Courtney and I nodded knowingly but did better not to speak.

“Just make sure to pace yourself,” a young German couple at Maurushaus told us before they left. We were sitting at the breakfast table, picking from the buffet spread of eggs, cereal, and cold meat on bread, and laying down a foundation that I would be grateful for later. Pace myself? No sweat. A single White Claw is often enough to leave my entire body red and hot as a sitting kettle. If there’s anything I know about drinking, it’s moderation.

It was officially October. Füssen was shrouded in a dull gray and cold rain was pattering on the pavement just beyond our window. Hoping for a slow start to recover from yesterday’s trek, we settled on a small café featuring “breakfast eggs” (soft-boiled eggs served in stately metal cups) and yogurt muesli. The ambiance, however, was less enticing. Disappointed by the soundtrack of angsty 2000s-era love songs (Ryan Cabrera, Maroon 5, and Hoobastank), we quickly abandoned the peaceful morning plan for a trip to what our guidebook called “a real-life fairytale oasis.”