Bear hall/October fest in Munich

The whole city is not a party zone. Life goes on as normal for the people who live there. The actual festival is in a large field outside of the downtown area. And daytime is more "family time" Dont expect rowdy gangs of drunken partiers all over the city. It's worth checking out the fest if you can leave your bags somewhere. It's directly at a U-bahn stop.

As has been mentioned the city is like always.

The Octoberfest ground (Theresienwiese) is only one subway station away from the Central Station.
I would suggest drop off your car and enjoy some hours at the Octoberfest :-)

But please note they allow you to bring only small handbags to the festival ground. But there are lockers at the Central Station.

My original plan when I forgot when Octoberfest is, was to drop the luggage at the strain station then go out and visit the city and hit a bear hall before out evening train departure. Then it dawned on me when we would be there during Octoberfest…

Depending on when we get in we should have 5-8 hours in Munich. It is really just a place to drop off the car and transition to trains for the rest of the trip.

Thanks for the advice

douglas, stay away from the bears!🐻

the main station in Munich - the Hauptbahnhof - is a bit of a building site at the moment, and not a lot of fun. The roads around the Hauptbahnhof are not a lot of fun.

If you don't want to get involved in all that you could perhaps return the car at the airport and catch a train to there which might change trains at a less messy station for your onward travel.

douglas, if I can ask - is the car a newish German registered rental car? The centre of Munich is an environmental zone and non-German registered cars (say if you got it in a neighbouring country) are very unlikely to have the mandatory Umweltplakette window sticker. Older cars won't qualify for the green one.

and one more - if you share the train trip destination there may be an alternate station as I said above....

Got to love autocorrect.
The car should be a relatively new German car as it will be picked up in Berlin,
The car rental locations near the train station are in a restricted zone? That is just crazy.
We are going to Rome,
I suppose we could drop off at the airport and train to the main station and then drop bags and go to Octoberfest.

Not crazy at all.

In all big cities in Germany you find the 'low emission zone' and only cars with a 'green vignette' can go there. Usually this zone is downtown and this is usually where the Central Stations are.

Berlin is having this as well and therefore your car will have this vignette for sure.

So you are taking the NightJet to Rome. We did similar a few years back, storing luggage at Hbf, went to Oktoberfest for the day, returnin to retrieve luggage and taking a night train to Venice.

If you are coming from Berlin, should be easy to drop a the car at Munich Airport then S-Bahn to Hbf. If you have not bought your train tickets yet, you could specify the start point as Munich Airport, then the train to Hbf will be included and you will not have to buy tickets for that at the airport. You are allowed to take any local transport any time that day to get to the departure point of the long distance portion of the journey.