Today was the day I had decided would be my visit to Neuschwanstein Schloss. I have to admit when I woke up the weather looked a bit grim and I am sure it had rained a couple times in the night as well but I was told the weather would be good and it would not be a bad day to do it. I had breakfast again at 8am because that is when they start. I didn't want to miss the coffee anyway because I was pretty sure it would be a full day ahead of me. I basically had the same as the day before and I am sure that will be the routine for the duration of this stay. After breakfast it was a quick job of packing up the car (which basically means getting the GPS) and then setting it for my destination and I was on my way. I do not think it is hard to get around here but that little device is certainly going to make it hard for me to learn the roads. I am fine with that though as I will be in the area only for a bit over a week. By the time I got started I could see some blue in the sky and perhaps things were really going to get better. During the drive I took my time and I think it might have taken about 45 minutes to get there in all.
On the way in you reach a church and you have a view of Neuschwanstein in the distance. I stopped there to take a few pictures and then I headed into town. The castle is definitely as stunning looking as I thought it would be. I am not sure if it was that same, "Oh wow," moment I had with Le Mont Saint Michel, but it was darked close. I think the castle being visible from a further away distance makes it look smaller at first view so maybe that limited the wow factor a touch. I found the first parking lot at the bottom of the hill for 5 Euros and decided it would be my easiest place to park. It wasn't very full but of course it was still early in the morning, before 9:30 I think. After packing up the GPS I worked my way up the hill to the ticket office and bought tickets for both Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles. The former is the castle that King Ludwig II spent all of his money building and is one of the best looking castles out there as subjective opinion goes. The latter is the castle he grew up in with his parents. It was built on the site of a Norman fort if I understood it correctly. That fort had been destroyed in the Napoleonic wars and the family rebuilt it to the castle it is today basically. In theory it is not as extravagant as Neuschwanstein but it is still a very nice castle.
When you visit Schwangau and book your visits you have to book for a specific time for each castle. The girl at the desk, who was really cute, suggested English language tours for Hohenschwangau at 10:50 and Neuschwanstein at 11:55. Each tour takes about a half an hour. You are responsible for getting to the castle at the appropriate time for your tour. It appears they do tours in German, English, Italian and French (maybe) or you can get an audioguide tour. I chose the English tours of course. When you get to the specific castle the entry is automated. Your ticket has a barcode on it and they have a automated ticket booths which will only let you enter if your tour is active. When your tour number shows on the screen at the right time for your tour you barcode your ticket and the turnstyle lets you in. No need for anyone at the ticket booth. After you get in you line up for your tour number in a queue and then they let you in and you start the tour. As I said, I started with Hohenschwangau. I wandered the area around it and took a bunch of pictures until it was my time to do the tour. The guide was quite good if his voice didn't carry quite as well as I would have liked. The castle is very nice inside and being a completed castle that had been lived in it was quite well furnished. Apparently as with Neuschwanstein most of the furnishings are original. That is pretty cool to know. Unfortunately you can't take pictures inside either castle for this reason. As usual this meant buying th pretty picture book. Ah well. The tour lasted about 35 minutes and most of the details were of Ludwig's mother and father as well as Wagner who stayed there as a friend of the family some many times. More on that in a little bit. Overall it was a quite enjoyable tour.
When Hohenschwangau was over I had to make my way to Neuschwanstein. Typically people take either a bus or a horse drawn carriage it appears but many people also choose to walk as I did. Since Neuschwanstein is much higher up on the mountain than Hohenschwangau the walk is basically all up hill. I took the climb as a challenge to meet in order to help me train for the Warriors Dash coming up in June. I can tell you it was about a 25 minute walk or so and it was non-stop uphill. By the time I reached the top I was pouring sweat because the sun had started to come out and my calfs were burning from the strain. It felt kind of good but it did take a while for me to dry down. Since the walk was quick for me, I had plenty of time to kill before the tour and I did that by wandering around and taking pictures and then just resting in the shade for a while. At 11:55 my tour was up and again I had to barcode my way in then queue up. This time we had a young woman guiding the tour. Her voice did carry a bit better than the guy from the other tour but she at times seemed to be straining to annunciate. It was fine though, she did a great job. I would say the guy might have been doing his tour longer because he had a fair bit of extra facts that she didn't have for Neuscwanstein. If you didn't know Ludwig had a love of castles and commissioned this one built and the were working on it for I believe 17 years before he moved into it. It was not completed when he moved in. The second floor was to be for guest rooms and had not been finished at the time of his death. The first floor was for the servants and did appear to be completed. You see the kitchen at the end of the tour and it appears to be the ground floor so with the living quarters for the King being on the 3rd floor it was 4 floors up for food. In any event, the completed rooms are quite spectacular, especially the throne room, though there is no throne in it. It was never built. The room was set up in the style of a Byzantine chapel and the chandelier is gigantic. Going up to the fourth floor you find the music room which is grand and has some incredible paintings. In fact the whole finished part of the castle (sans the servants rooms) are all wonderfully painted in themes based on Wagner's operas. Ludwig was a big fan of Wagner and had actually dedicated the design and decoration of the castle to Wagner. Thus all the rooms had the paintings with themes based on his operas. I am not sure that Wagner stayed in Neuschwanstein, but Ludwig lived there for less than 180 days. When it was obvious he had run himself out of money building castles the government created a secret council and declared him insane thus allowing them to depose him from rule. It is the reason he is known as Mad King Ludwig they say. 3 days after he was removed from power he died under mysterious circumstances, it sounded by drowning in a lake. They say know one knows if it as suicide, murder or an accident to this day.
After completing the tour of the castle I had a hasty lunch of a sausage on a bun and a beer that was moderately forgettable if 4.9% alcohol. After that I took some pictures from a small supsended platfrom in front of the castle then I walked up and around to the Marienbrucke bridge (not sure I spelled that correctly). The bridge is over a waterfall and gives an incredible view of the castle. It again was mostly uphill to get there but was not quite as far a distance between the two castles. I took quite a few pictures there hoping that at least one or two of them do the place justice. The bridge is metal with wooden planks running as floorboards. The planks were often very bouncy and flexy and it was a bit disconcerting for one afraid of heights. I did however manage to stay on it for quite some time and didn't skitter off at the first wierd bounce, so I felt good about that. I crossed it to the other side and then back again in the time there. I believe there are other paths that could be followed in the region but without a great map I wasn't going to risk sending myself far out of town by accident so I just worked my way back into town when I was through with the bridge. On the way down I stopped and got an ice cream at a cafe along the route. I had a choco-coconut flavored ice cream in a waffle cone. It was quite good and reminded me of a chocolate coconut donut, my favorite type of donut. When I was back in town it was a bit after 3pm so I decided to do the souvenir shopping I needed to do and then got back to the car, paid my 5 Euros and drove out of town.
On the drive back I got stuck behind a tractor being followed by a truck. They do allow passing on these two lane roads but it is all windy and in the forest a lot of the way so I really didn't get a chance to get around them. Fortunately I had already made up my mind I was going to detour to Wieskirche on the way back because it was still before 4pm. So when I made that turn the tractor and truck stayed straight. The detour couldn't have been more than a mile and a half. The Wieskirche is a huge baroque style church. It is really massive looking from the outside. I am not sure it rivals Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome but I am sure that it is another quite stunning use of parishoners' money. Apparently the Bavarian region is Catholic in general and this church is Catholic. It felt Catholic to me. It is free to visit and they don't appear to mind taking pictures so I did leave a couple Euro donation. If they want to charge me to get in in the first place I might skip but if it is free to get in I can donate, if only to keep the place up. I didn't really spend a huge amount of time at the church but appears all there really is to see around Wies so after the visit I packed back up and drove back to the hotel for the evening. Since the food in the hotel has been good and it keeps me from having to worry about drinking and driving I figure it is the best that I try to eat here each night. So far I have enjoyed it. At the hotel I was a bit early for dinner but got out on the balcony for my room and set about writing this. It is a beautiful night out and if it weren't for the bees that liked the flowers in the flowerboxes on the balcony it would have been perfect. Still they only bothered me a little bit and I can't tell if they are stinging types or not though one definitely enjoyed getting in my face while I was typing. All the same I don't think it bothered me too much or I would have moved inside to continue.
I went down for dinner basically right on time. No nap today because I arrived at the hotel at around 5pm. I spent a few minutes just standing on the outside portion of the porch watching the locals cut the huge field of hay and spread it around until the waitress showed up. It was not the normal waitress who is Sabine, but instead Jeannette who is a neighbor apparently. All the same the service and food were excellent. I had to Koenig Ludwig Weissbier Dunkels to accompany a rolled meat roast stuffed with pickles and onions and bacon, spaetzle and mixed vegetables. The food was excellent and I found the spaetzle really grew on me the more I ate them. If you are unaware they are basically the German answer to pasta being a dough that is strung through a press and boiled. In the brown sauce from the meat they were very tasty. Along the way Sid and the guest who is here for the Nato school who is from Venezuela originally and lives in L.A. right now all talked about various subjects. It was a beautiful night out and a very enjoyable evening. The weather was perfect from about noon on though I guess it was warmer in Oberammergau than it was around Schwangau where I was most of the day. Sid said it really got too warm with the sun. By the time dinner had come though the temperature was just perfect. I'd guess around 22C or and no wind. After the dinner I finished off my second beer slowly and then had the dessert and a coffee. The dessert seemed to be a peach cobbler type thing without the crumble. I am not sure what it was called because I never saw the menu for the day. They didn't have it ready at breakfast and I ordered based on description before I left for the day. It was also quite good. We talked long after we were all finished eating. It is always great to get different perspectives on life and the world. It reminds me that for all the people in the world there really are a lot of persons out there. I differentiate the two. People as a group and persons as individuals. Life would be awful if we only acted on the will of the group rather than as individuals. But enough philosophising. I definitely like it down here in this corner of the world. I can see why Sid keeps coming back so often very easily. Neuschwanstein was definitely the reason I came to this region, but it is obvious there is something beautiful about the whole area.
When I get to post them there will be around 280 pictures from today.
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