That Night in Munich my Uber Crashed and I got Bit (by a human) at a Gas Station during a Lightning Storm… After a Taylor Swift Concert.

You may be thinking this is an odd blog topic for a health and fitness professional. I agree. But this story is too good not to share, and I promise I have a point… 

Before we get to the Uber crash and resulting gas station bite, I need to take you back to the prior evening. 

I had just landed in Munich after leaving my husband and friends behind in Italy, only to meet up with a few other friends for Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour. 

(Keep in mind, I had never been east of Myrtle Beach, so this was a lot.)

I landed in Munich…
Met up with my friends at a castle.

Ate some sausage. 
Drank some beer.

Even got some German guys number… (sorry buddy, married.)
And woke up Saturday morning, July 26, 2024 ready to see Taylor Swift (for the first time) at Olympic Stadium. 

After a slow morning with some coffee and (somewhat questionable) food, we pulled up our mobile tickets before heading back to our Air B&B to get ready.

This is where my day starts to unravel.
Stub Hub did NOT have my tickets… cue spike in heart rate.
Their entire brand is built on the premise of ‘support from ticket purchase to butt in your seat,’ so I wasn’t panicking. Yet.

I got a customer service agent on the line who proved… unhelpful. 

Couldn’t for the life of him figure out why my tickets had not been “released” or whatever that meant even though I had proof of purchase. He assured me he would get to the bottom of the issues and call me back in a few hours. 

The show was maybe 6 hours away at this point, so I’m starting to sweat, but without any other options, I said okay. 

We go back to the AirB&B and start making friendship bracelets (since that’s what swifties do before her shows…) to keep me distracted. 

By now, we only have 4 hours until doors open and I haven’t heard anything, so I call Stub Hub back only to be informed that they’ve made z.e.r.o. progress on my ticketing issues. Fun.

Keep in mind, we splurged for this show. 
Stage side, floor tickets. 
I did NOT fly my ass to a foreign country by myself to NOT see this show. 

Deep breaths Hannah, deep breaths. 

Admittedly, I was starting to panic and my patience was disintegrating with each subsequent time they muttered “we thank you for your patience and need to put you on a brief hold”... again… and again… and again.

So instead of getting ready while dancing around to Taylor Swift in Munich with my friends like I had envisioned, I’ve had an airpod in for 2 hours and am ON MY WAY to Olympic Stadium in the back of an Uber (don’t get too excited, this one doesn’t crash)... 

Still no ticket. 
WHAT THE F***. 

Low and behold, by some swiftie magic I’ll never understand… My ticket was “released” 10 minutes before we were dropped off, and the night was back on track.  

Time to “shake it off” (pun absolutely intended) and have a blast singing and dancing stage-side with Taylor Swift. 
Or so I thought…
I was incorrect. 

Half the fun of going to shows is taking pictures with your friends and snagging a few videos of your FAVORITE songs to relive over and over. After this ticket extravaganza, my phone battery was down to 40% before the show started.

And no, I did not have an extra battery. 

No biggie. My friends can take pictures and videos. 
She also ordered a post show Uber ahead of time for one less thing to worry about later.

We snagged a beer and a pretzel. 
Found out our tickets were way better than we expected.

Rocked out to the opener, Paramore, and the day’s troubles were a thing of the past. 

We had time for a bathroom break between Paramore’s set and when we expected Taylor to make her grand Miss Americana debut. 
Or so we thought. 

Standing in this underground stairwell waiting for the bathroom in a sea of swifties we hear a familiar song…
Is this her? It can’t be. It's too early… 

Someone yells down the stairs “SHE’S COMING OUT EARLY, THIS VENUE HAS AN EARLY CURFEW!” 
The stampede begins.

We launch into a full sprint around the venue (with thousands of our closest friends.) 
The. show. was. amazing. 
We sang. We cried. We danced. We laughed. We screamed.

By 10 pm, it was raining, she was finishing her set with Karma, my phone was dead, and I didn’t even care. 

We herd out of Olympic stadium as lightning started streaking the sky and the rain picked up… only to realize our scheduled Uber was for two hours from now. Not ideal.

My friend is one of thousands in this moving herd fighting for a cell signal. We keep walking toward the main roads and the Uber driver responds in the app. 

He can’t come any earlier. He cancels the scheduled pick up. 

Here is when my spidey senses start to tingle. 

My friends phone battery is under 10%, (Mine has been dead)
The rain and lightning are getting angrier.
We’re in a foreign country. 
… shit. 

I see a group of girls (clearly dressed for the concert), grab my friend's hand, and barrel across the street straight at them. We enter a concrete tunnel (well aware this screams slasher movie vibes at this point) packed with swifties all waiting for their Ubers and trying to stay out of the storm. 

And bless it, MOST spoke English and were happy to let us charge our phones on their external batteries. This wave of relief was short lived once their rides started showing up minus later and they were all leaving… 

Us alone…  In a dark tunnel… In a thunderstorm…
Near midnight… In Munich…  
With dead phones. 

As I’m contemplating our “get the hell out of here” strategy… 

From deeper in the tunnel we hear: “Hey, you need some juice?” 

And this blonde with a welcoming smile handed me her battery pack and charging cord. My shoulders visibly sagged with relief and we started chatting…

Admittedly desperate at this point, I asked if we could hop into their Uber set to arrive in a few minutes, get dropped off at their hotel, then get another one from there… Instead of pressing out luck in this damp, dark tunnel.

5 minutes later the Uber pulls up, the blonde from Chicago climbs into the front as me, my friend, and her friend slide into the back. We plug our phones into his car to keep charging, and as he pulled away from the curb, I closed my eyes, let my head rest on the back of the seat, and smiled. We made it. 

BOOM. 
Not one minute later, the driver changes lanes and collides with another vehicle. It was a mild fender bender, but let me tell you… 

12/10 do not recommend getting into an Uber accident in a foreign country. 

It's almost 1 am, all 4 of us passengers are wet, starving, have to pee, and now, we have to fork over our drivers licenses for the Uber statement for the crash. Chicago blonde’s Uber app recognized we abruptly stopped and is asking if she is okay… or if she’s been abducted, the driver is a ball of stress as we find out we’re his fourth Uber ride ever (he was a brand new driver), and the German police said they’re coming and we can’t leave. 

After much pleading, we convinced our driver to let us walk to a gas station a block away to use the bathroom as long as we promised to come back (yes he held our licenses ransom). We hustle to this gas station only to find out the bathroom is outside and the lights don’t work (which wouldn’t have been an issue if it hadn’t been 1 am and pitch black). 

We took turns wearing our light up Taylor Swift bracelets to see in the outside bathroom, then wander into the gas station for snacks. With the pre show pretzel and beer long gone, we buy an obscene amount of food from vacuum packed turkey and ham, to chips, pasta salad, chocolate, and ice cream. And yes, okay, I did buy a bag of carrots (all about a balanced diet, right?). 

With smiles, empty bladders, and arms full of food, the 4 of us are scurrying back to the Uber wasting no time mowing through our gas station feast. I look over and see my friend visibly struggling trying to open the gas station ham she just had to have… so being the good friend I am, I open it for her.

Instead of “thanks,” she insists I feed her the slimy ham as we walk down the street… 

And she bit me. 
She went in for the ham… got my finger instead. 

Marking that as the first and last time I feed a 4 foot 10 inch red head ham from a gas station.  

As we shimmy back into the Uber, the driver says the police are no longer coming and we get to leave. The Chicago girls get dropped off at their hotel, and the driver is so thrilled he wasn’t talking to the police, offered to drop us off at our AirB&B. 

By 3 am, with a belly full of gas station deli meat, chips, and carrots, and my rain (and sweat) soaked dress peeled off, I collapse into bed on the top floor of our Air B&B hosted by a local Opera singer, and vaguely remember laughing myself to sleep.

Why am I sharing this story with you… on my health and fitness blog? 
Simple. 
The same thing that got me out of Munich alive is what afforded me my 60+ pound weight loss journey. 

Not grit. Not perseverance. Not luck. 
Support. 

I am independent to a fault. 
The kid that hated group projects in school? Hi, me. 

But when it came to my Stub Hub ticketing issue?
Couldn't have succeeded without their support. 

Charging my dead phone?
Not possible without the support from strangers in a tunnel. 

Getting a ride out of downtown Munich during a thunderstorm?
You guessed it, required support. 

No matter how smart, capable, and dedicated you are. 
There will be situations where support is required. 

When I was struggling with my weight over 60 pounds and over a decade ago, independent me was determined to conquer this challenge alone. 

I’m smart. Capable. Dedicated… 
I was a doctor of physical therapy for f*** sake… 
Getting support wasn’t even on my radar. 
(I knew what to do, obviously [insert dramatic eye roll])

Until I saw a friend of mine getting the weight loss results I wanted… while I was getting nowhere. 
That’s when it clicked.

I could struggle with my weight alone…. 
Or I could overcome the issue with support. 
The choice was simple. And you know how this story ends. 

Getting support doesn’t take away from you ability, intelligence, or dampen your results. 

It enhances your ability, compliments your intelligence, and accelerates your results. 

Support is the difference between trying to lose weight and feel healthy, and actually making those your reality. But there is something else…

Something else that is almost as important as getting support to not just losing a few pounds only to put them back on, but losing the weight once and for all, so you never have to *start over* again. 

That something else story starts in a beer garden the next day after the whole Uber crash, gas station bite incident… 

And ends with us weasling our way into Taylor Swift’s second show in Munich for a two-night-in-a-row Era’s Tour hoorah… 

Learn how the second thing you need to succeed at weight loss is the very thing that got us past security (after we were flagged for stealing tickets) and back into Olympic Stadium for round two. 

I wouldn’t believe this story if it wasn’t mine to tell…

Tap here to see what happened, and how this story ends! 

Yours in fitness & health… and gas station ham,
Hannah