If I were on my normal school-day schedule, I would have to say that we slept in this morning – but since we’re on vacation, I’d have to say that we were up early at 5:50. It was raining lightly, but since we were driving to the town of Hohenschwangau to visit to Schloss Hohenschwangau and Schloss Neuschwanstein, we wanted to allow plenty of time for contingencies.
We were checked out of the hotel by 7:20, then walked the four blocks back to the Europcar rental office in the Hauptbahnhof. We picked up our rental – a black, four door Seat Ibizi and a Garmin GPS unit – and were on the road by 7:55.
The streets in the older tows in Europe are often laid out in rings and spokes. So even though I had brought four different maps and a road atlas with from home, trying to change from a grid-based navigation method without any clues from the sun is difficult. Therefore, we began by blindly following the Garmin GPS lady’s directions.
It quickly becomes evident that she’s heading us to Hohenschwangau via route A95; this is a shorter way to get there, but we (OK, Gary) wanted to travel the more scenic route of A96. We tried some “creative” detours, and subsequently saw a lot of local burghs just west of Munich while looking for route A96. After 45 minutes without success, I just gave in to Ms. Garmin, christening her “Our Lady of Perpetual Navigation” (or OLoPN, for short).
She got us back on the A95 autobahn quickly. There are no speed limits on this part of the autobahn, but in a foreign country, in rain, and in an unfamiliar vehicle, 120 km/h (kilometers per hour, or roughly 75 MPH) seemed fast enough.
We arrived in the town of Hohenschwangau at 10:50 a.m. We found the ticket office where we could purchase the tickets we reserved by E-mail the previous day. If you did not have reserved tickets, the line was something like that for a popular roller coaster at Great America; with reservations, however, we stepped right up and got our tickets. We fortified ourselves with two caffe au laits and two brezels (pretzels), then set off on the 15 minute mildly uphill walk to Schloss Hohenschwangau.
The castle was originally the home of Maximilian, the King of Bavaria, from 1832 to1836. No photos were allowed inside the castle, so we were limited to exterior scenes. They had a tree-form flowering shrub with deep blue-violet flowers, included here for Master Gardener identification:
The tour of Schloss Hohenschwangau was done at 1:20. We then started walking toward Schloss Neuschwanstein (seen in the distance from Schloss Hohenschwangau in the following photo) for our 2:20 tour.
We stopped for a snack of cookies and water or Coke at the base of the climb (see if you can match Aileen and Gary with the correct beverage).The VERY uphill walk to Schloss Neuschwanstein was estimated at 30 to 45 minutes, but us overachievers made it in 22 minutes.
Construction on Schloss Neuschwanstein was started in 1882 by the popular-but-eccentric King Ludwig II. He loved building castles, and almost bankrupted the monarchy in the process. The original design sketches for the castle were done by a theater artist, not an architect. In retrospect, this seems appropriate, as Walt Disney later used Neuschwanstein as one of his inspirations for Cinderella’s Castle. King Ludwig II died in 1886 at age 42, before his castle was finished. The castle is covered by tarps this year for some restoration work, which kills some of the exterior views:
We walked back down the hill, retrieved our car, and headed to the town of Fussen for fuel ($1.639 per liter, about $7.75 US per gallon) and an Austrian autobahnvignette – a tax stamp that lets you drive on the autobahns in Austria, as opposed to having to pay tolls on them. It was then onto the town of Reutte, Austria and the Hotel Goldene-Rose for the night after two pizzas for dinner.
Aileen says her hip flexor is unusually sore after today’s sojourn. It must hurt a lot for her to walk, as it makes me hurt just to watch her. She did some stretches and took a hot shower, and went to bed at 8:30, which is early even for her. I’m finishing this up at 10:30 to the sound of rain on the roof. Tomorrow: off toward Salzburg - see ya’ then.
Distance report: 156 km / 94 miles (car), 3 miles (by foot), 97 miles for the day, 4,740 miles so far this trip
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