"Don't freak out ..."

I should know better than to give my husband public praise. Because it never fails. He, almost effortlessly, finds his way right back on to my shit list.

I like this guy, I said. I love him, I said. I want to keep him, I said.

And then he went to Oktoberfest.

He and his teammates (and a few of the girls) hired a bus to drive them to Munich and back.

They did the same thing last season and aside from the usual hiccups (someone gets into a fight with an Australian or an Italian, someone passes out under a random tree, someone drinks too much and gets sick) it was a fairly uneventful trip. They had the bus ride home to sleep it off and sober up and everyone seemed to be in pretty good shape by the time they got home. There were a few funny stories, none of which included my husband. I was impressed. And somewhat relieved.

I guess this time around, I expected it would be the same. So two Mondays ago, I sent him on his merry way. Have fun, I said.

I figured that if he was going to have a blast, I should have a little fun too. So Linden and I drove about an hour away, to have a sleepover with my friend Kim and her kiddos.

We stopped at Starbucks. We shopped. We ate at Vapiano. We stopped at Starbucks again. The kids played. We watched Magic Mike. We sent her husband on a late-night McDonalds run. It really was the perfect day.

But for some reason, I went to bed anxious.

I tossed and turned all night. I woke up every hour.

It wasn't weird that I didn't hear from him before bed. In fact, if he was inebriated, I preferred not to hear from him because it's my opinion that drunk people (myself excluded of course) are really fucking annoying.

But it was weird that by 9 am, I hadn't received word that he made it on the bus or that he was tucked safely in bed in our apartment.

Kim told me not to worry. He's 32 years old, she said.

My phone sounded. Don't freak out ..., the text read.

... I'm in some random city 250 km out of Munich. Going to take the train back.

Sure enough, he was about 250 km out of Munich.

He didn't know what city he was in and couldn't quite remember how he got there. He just knew that at some point, he decided he had enough of the Oktoberfest shenanigans and wanted to go home. In is drunken stupor, he hopped a train.

Around 11 pm, as the team bus was leaving Munich, he talked to one of his teammates. Apparently they were trying to figure out where he was and if the bus could pick him up along the way. It was the blind leading the blind at that point, because his teammate told him he was 250 km in the WRONG direction. In reality, he had actually made it halfway home.

He had spent his evening on a train bound for nowhere, in his lederhosen.

Two trains and two and a half hours later, he was sitting next to me in the passenger seat of our car. Head hung in shame ... and hungoverness.

Can you stop at McDonald's, he asked.

The thing is, it's Oktoberfest. I can't tell you how many crazy Oktoberfest stories I have heard. Kim's husband had a handful of his own. For every team that goes, there's almost always one (or more) who doesn't make it home with the rest. I didn't think my husband would be that one, but ...

I'll leave you with this photo taken at the Munich train station. It is totally possible that dude in the red shirt is my husband.

No. Seriously.