Our last day in Germany until we come back to Berlin in a few weeks.
We drove down to near the border with Austria to see Neuschwanstein, THE thing to see in Germany apparently (based on the number of tour buses). Neuschwanstein is the castle that Walt Disney based the Cinderella castle in Disneyland on, as well as being a flypaper to tourists. Pictures weren't allowed in the castle, so the best we could do for this page was to take a couple of pictures of the castle from the outside.
To compare the Residenz to Neuschwanstein would be kind of like comparing oranges to apples (Apfel in German). Neuschwanstein, though it looks like a medieval castle, was only built in the 1800's, while the Residenz has been around for a lot longer. Most of the decorations in Neuschwanstein were paintings, though there were some other impressive carvings and mosaics. There was an English language tour available, so we stepped right up for that. When they are available, the tours are worth it. The tour guides can explain the things that you can't understand due to the language barrier. My only gripe about the castle was that it was packed with tourists, and they only let you see the interior if you take a tour. The tour only shows you maybe 2/3 of the rooms as well. Understandable though, since the castle was never finished because the guy paying for it, King Ludwig, died suddenly.
If you are going to Germany, I would recommend visiting the castle. It is accessible by car, and I'm sure you can find information on tours. After finishing the tour, we walked up to the Mary's Bridge, which is a couple hundred feet away from the castle. The bridge runs across a gorge, and is a very beautiful sight. If you are into hiking, there is a path from the bridge to the top of a mountain (smallish mountain, but I also haven't mentioned that the castle is near the Alps. So the "small" mountain is one of the foothills of the Alps.) where we took some more photos of Neuschwanstein and sat around for a few minutes basking in the (cold) Alpine air.
From there we crossed the border into Austria to a town called Reutte, where we had some lunch. Schnitzel to be exact, a good change from the wurst. After a while, wurst can start to taste the wur..worst. Unfortunately, we had to drive the car all the way back to Munich to drop it off, so we missed seeing the sights in Reutte, a summertime "luge" and some ruins of an old Austrian castle. Oh well, we will get them the next time. Even if it was just for the food, the trip was worth it. We leave tomorrow for Austria, where we will be staying in Salzburg and then Vienna.
For those curious, we have had some technical difficulty in getting the webpage uploaded every night, due (we think) to a faulty telephone adapter. But the hostels where we will probably be staying don't have public telephone lines, so uploading will be a problem. In the end it might turn out that we grab a public phone, slap an acoustic coupler onto it, and upload the pages that way. So don't be surprised if there is a break of a day or two and then a large update -- telephones and telephone service here fluctuates wildly from city to city and country to country.
