Bavaria III, Including Neuschwanstein

It’s about 10:20 pm and everyone else in the Little House on the Lake (which is technically neither little nor on a lake) has gone to bed. I’m still so excited about our daytrip I can’t sleep and have chosen to get these zillion pictures posted before I cash in. (Trine says I’m just doing it to prove to myself it really happened, and I think she has a point.

In any case, before we get to today’s day trip into the Alps we have a little backlog.

A shot of the bubble robot hard at work, doing what it does best (doing, in fact, the only thing it does):

And a shot of Maddie that was supposed to show her fading chicken pox, but they’ve already faded so much more this picture already feels dated:

And some local shots: Feldafing by day.

… the robot toils on, never tiring, never retiring …

The picture below is just to remind us how strange it is that every little town in Bavaria, be it ever so humble, has one of these “Town Poles” in its center… sort of like a cross between a lance and a barber pole. They baffled us at first, but now that we know they’re just part of the German municipal planning, it all makes so much more sense.

I mentioned that the white sausage turd floating in the toilet bowl served with a side of pretzels and dill sauce were a “normal” Bavarian snack, and that I’d seen them in marzipan form? Here’s the marzipan.

April 1 day trip to Starnberg, the city up the lake.

We found a little “bistro” that is now my favorite deli in the world, though I know full well I will probably never darken its doors with my half-assed American form again:

A lot of these little Bavarian houses are painted with tromp l’oeil designs to make them more interesting. Here’s one that caught my eye in Tutzing, near the liquor store:

Details:

A budding friendship:

Molli Malou at play:

Maddie and Flash, at it again:

OKAY! So, today, April 2, we pile into the car around 11am and drive off toward Mad King Ludwig’s famous castle, Neuschwanstein. The drive is breathtaking. We point our nose toward the Alps and let the GPS guide us (realizing after a tunnel that baffled our GPS that if the GPS suddenly went out we’d be completely lost). It’s a shortish drive, not much over an hour, and suddenly Molli Malou says, “Hey, look, there’s a castle up in those mountains.”

It’s hard to see, can’t blame you if you missed it, we did too.

But it’s there. And moments later we’re in the municipal parking lot of Hohenshuangau, the town about which the castles are built. Molli Malou is excited. (And notice the SNOW!)

Schloss is German for castle, and there are two in this neck of the woods: Schloss Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. We were primarily interested in the latter — the one Mad King Ludwig II had built either to retreat from politics or seduce Wagner, depending on who you’re listening to — but the other was hard to look away from.

Neuschwanstein had it beat though, by nearly any measure:

Which isn’t to say it wasn’t impressive:

But how can you compete with this:

Well, we had a nice lunch in town — Trine and I went for schnitzels and fries, which she washed down with a diet cola and I with a King Ludwig Dark (soon, I think, to become my new Facebook photo) — and Molli Malou had a pizza while Maddie sucked down a bottle of her HIPP spaghetti Bolognese.

And the spirit of Ludwig called us toward his castle… just a 30-minute hike up a steep, steep trail.

The following picture is of the carvings over his (Ludwig’s) bed. It took 14 carpenters 4 full years to carve it — and because my flash went off, it earned me the opprobrium of our tour guide, who pointedly asked me, to my family’s mortification, “not please to take pictures.”

Worth it, I think, and you would too if you’d seen the shot I got without the flash.

On the way down we (by which I mean Molli Malou) decided to take a horse-carriage instead of walking, and an Orange County couple seated opposite us were kind enough to get one of the first foursome pictures of us from the entire trip:

And that’s it… the drive back was uneventful, since I had no way of recording what I saw in the rear-view mirror.

* * *

As a note to file, my Wagner-Ludwig fixation began over 20 years ago. The whole time we were touring the castle’s interior I could hear Dallas Brock’s voice intoning various factoids about Wagner, Ludwig, the 1860s, Lohengrin, Parsifal. I thought a lot about all the work I put into my sensibly abandoned Wagner play and how desperately I’d wanted to see this particular castle from the very moment I’d learned of its existence. (And yes, as Deb asked on Facebook, it is indeed the model Disney used for their signature castle… but it also struck me as a likely model for the city of men pressed up agaisnt the mountains in the LOTR trilogy.) And one thing I took away from it is that although I kept forcing myself to try and make Ludwig real and human and 3-dimensional, the guy was in fact completely batshit crazy. Utterly and completely mad. Bonkers.

Anyway, it was a good Good Friday for our little family. Tomorrow we buy and dye eggs, Sunday morning is the big Easter Egg Hunt, and then we’re on the road up to Goslar (where we have a hotel reservation), then Monday we finish the drive back home.

Sad.

But on a happy note, Flash is already free of his paw-wrappings and is recovering beautifully!