A trip to the magical Castle Neuschwanstein

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Monday 21st September
A trip to the magical Castle Neuschwanstein
We are not really getting used to these European pillows which are large,square and flat.Its difficult to get them into a position so that your shoulders are comfortable overnight while you sleep.We have talked about seeing if we can buy some pillows like we are used to at home and maybe today we will have a look in a bedding store if we pass one on our trip to the castle.
Breakfast is all part of the deal at Gasthaus Ratskeller and its a tidy spread that Franck and his wife put on including soft boiled eggs, for which Gretchen went back for a second helping, and a scrambled egg that has onion and speck(German bacon)through it.Very tasty!!
The drive to the castle which is just beyond Fussen will only take a half hour so we are not too quick on the road this morning.
However upon arrival at the castle car park we were wondering if we should have been here earlier because the car park is full and there are fleets of buses and people everywhere.
Castle Neuschwanstein(I won’t mention it by its full name again as it talks too long to spell,so it will be known as the castle)hits you as soon as you open the car door.Perched up on a rocky outcrop and high above the trees that surround it the castle is a photographers dream.
The castle used in the Disneyland brand is based upon it so even if you haven’t been here you will automatically get an image of what we were looking at after we parked RR.
Just beyond the car park there are cafes on both sides of the road leading up to the large and very well organised ticket office.The noticeboard for coffee and strudel at €4.50 looked tempting but with all the people around we thought we better go and get tickets and do the castle before we worried about more food and so soon after the large breakfast.
It was just as well we did because we discovered that one can only do a guided tour of the castle and that the tour groups were restricted in size so a time for the next available tour in English was allocated when we purchased the tickets.Our tour would start in just over an hour so we had a little bit of time up our sleeve.
Now as you can imagine with the castle up on a rocky outcrop there was some distance to go to get to it.There are 3 options,a bus at €1.80 up and €1.00 down(that tells you how steep the bus has to climb),a ride in a carriage pulled by two horses at a price we didn’t find out and the BBA way,on foot at €0.00!!The walk was going to take about 30 minutes or so the notice at the start of the road stated.
We headed off straight away thinking we could take our time and admire the view over the plain below the castle as we went.A good percentage of the tourists walking either up or down were from some Asian country or another and it was obvious that they were not used to taking on such steep grades either up or down and many did not have the right sort of footwear even though the road was sealed.
We have been seeing a lot of people walking with these Nordic walking poles in various places we have been in Europe and here was no exception.I think I have found Gretchens Christmas present and can see her charging around Matua and Cherrywood Nordic walking poles going in all directions!!!
We are pleased we didn’t choose the horse and carriage option after a couple went past us while we had a seat to admire the view and do some people watching.The horses wore specially built shoes so that when their hooves came down on the road surface that had some grip and were inclined to the steepness of the road.We couldn’t help feel sorry for them as they clopped their way pulling full carriages of about 8 people plus the driver up the hill.At least we didn’t add to their burden today.There must be something in the European way of life as we seem to have come across horses and carriages in most tourist attractions we have visited.
We made the castle with plenty of time to spare and while waiting for our tour to start a trio of Mum and Dad and daughter came and sat beside us and started talking with Kiwi accents.Wow,meeting two lots of Kiwis in three days after not seeing or hearing that accent for weeks.So we swapped stories of our adventures and what they were up to and then it was time for the tour to start.
As I mentioned earlier the castle is a photographers dream as from every angle the view is quite different and because the structure is so large,especially close up,the light also gives different options for what you want to capture in your shot.The view out over the plain from the height of the castle is also very expansive and great for panoramic photos.
Like the ticket office down the hill the entry to the castle through the courtyard is very well organised and it has to be with 3 tours(presumably in different languages) of 50 or 60 people each starting every 20 minutes from 9am to 6pm every day of the week.There are coloured lamps that have the time and number of each tour about to start and after you go through a stile that reads your ticket number you line up in a queue under your tour number.All very efficient and may I say it,very German.We have been very impressed by how orderly this country is and we wish it could be instilled in NZ a bit more!!
The castle ,which was built for King Ludwig of Bavaria in the 1880’s,was never actually finished so what you see on the tour lasts just over half an hour taking in the parts that were finished.King Ludwig met an untimely end by drowning a day after he was declared insane and taken away to a Munich hospital.He had of course commited suicide or so the story goes.
You can tell as you walk around inside that Ludwig was a bit of an odd character or perhaps we should say,eccentric,as his two biggest obsessions feature everywhere in the parts of the castle that were finished.They were swans(hence the castle name in English ‘New Sawn Stone’) and the composer Wagner,whose operas feature in all the paintings throughtout the rooms and halls.In the Kings sitting room there are reputed to be one hundred swans included in the painted walls.We didn’t have enough time to count them all but there plenty!!.
Ludwig had a number of ‘firsts’incorporated into his castle which he lived in for only a few months before he was declared insane.He had the first telephone in Germany.Naturally,as his was the first phone there weren’t going to be too many other people for him to telephone and at the time he died he had just one other number he could call and that was the Post Office in the village at the foot of the hill.!!The telephone is still on display as part of the tour.He also had the first form of automatic flushing toilet!!What a shame for a man far ahead of his time to be committed insane and meet such an untimely finish.
It was an interesting tour despite having to do it in such a large group as we generally like to do these things at our own pace.But we can see it would never work if people were allowed to wander free in the place considering the numbers that might all want to visit at once for one of the more well known attractions in Bavaria.
We took a short cut back down the hill through the forest via steps and pathway as the smell of coffee and apple strudel was highly anticipated.It was delicious too with ice cream and two huge dollops of cream to go with the strudel.However what we thought was going to be €4.50 turned out to be a bit more because the cheap deal was without the ice cream or cream.It wouldn’t have been the same without those two additives!!
We were back in Oy-Mittelberg by mid afternoon and as it was such a beautiful day we thought we might continue on to walk to Mittelberg after we parked RR back at the Gasthaus.
We had no real idea how big Mittelberg was going to be but our expectations were for a town of some size after all it was marked on our atlas map(whereas Oy-Mittelberg wasn’t)AND it is one of the 10,000 locations in the world that feature on www.weather.com(we know this because we checked the website out to find out what the weather was going to do while we were here.
We headed off on the half hour walk past the soccer field and over the meadows and finally up a hill.From the bottom of the hill we could see houses and we anticipated that the main shopping street would be amongst them as in Oy-Mittelberg but on a larger scale(because the place does feature on www.weather.com)!!!
How wrong we were!!There were a few Gasthaus,although most looked like they were closed up,and there was a shop although it was only open until midday.How did this place get to be on weather.com when Oy-Mittelberg is 4 or 5 times larger??!!The only reasons we can come up with is that it is perhaps more strategically located up the hill a bit further then Oy-Mittelberg and it has someone prepared to record the weather details of the day.!!
Not finding what we thought we might we went hack home by a different route and had ourselves a pre dinner drink and nibbles.The meal last night had been so good we decided not to try either of the other restaurants in the village but went back downstairs to the Gasthaus restaurant.
We decided to both be a bit more adventurous tonight and with the help of Frank’s wife(we never did to know her name)Gretchen chose a potato,pepper and salami dish(which I had to help her to finish ‘cos it was sooooo big)and I chose a pork steak with tomatoes and cheese with veges all washed down with a couple of wines.
We think Frank and his wife will be sorry when we have to move on tomorrow as we have challenged their English conversation and they have been fun to do it with..

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