Our trip to Bavaria

Posted by jayneandalex on 10/15/21 04:09 PM

We just returned from two lovely weeks in Bavaria. I thought I’d share some of our experiences with regard to pandemic travel. Keep in mind that we were only in Bavaria and Salzburg.
As I had read prior to travel, Bavaria has some strict protocols in place. Every restaurant asked to see our vaccine card. We even sometimes got asked when we were sitting outside. Only once were we asked for our ID to prove that the vaccine cards were ours. We had no trouble with our CDC cards.
We didn’t get around to downloading the contact tracing app so we filled out their forms at each restaurant. Sometimes those forms were paper, other times they were on a tablet.
Masking indoors was strictly enforced, except when sitting at a restaurant table. (Note: in Salzburg, once we had proven that we were vaccinated in hotels and restaurants we did not need to use masks. Only in places like stores, which don’t require proof of vaccination.). They said we needed FFP2 masks, which we had, but there were people wearing surgical masks. No bandanas, buffs, etc..
We were a bit nervous about getting the right kind of COVID test for returning to the USA. As a precaution, we brought some test kits from Binex Now / emed. $150 for a 6 pack. You need internet connection and you do the test in front of a screen with someone somewhere in the world watching. I wasn’t able to make it work on my phone so we all used my iPad. It was helpful to have one of us functioning as a camera person. Contrary to what I had heard, we were connected to an observer within a minute.
The hotel was also offering free COVID tests so we got those as well. They were rapid antigen tests but the report didn’t say the word “viral”. For that reason, we did both tests. We were told by two Lufthansa people that they were both valid.
Because we were staying in a town on the Czech border, we went to The Czech Republic for a day. Things were a lot looser there.
All in all we had a great trip. We all felt safer there than we would have felt here, mostly because they have strict rules and everyone seems to accept them.