A Birthday Castle

Happy 57th birthday mom! You’re back to being within 10 years of dad, well done! I apologize for making you get up so early on your birthday but we have places to go and things to see ;~) First up on today’s list is the Neuschwanztien Castle. I am very excited about this visit. Neuschwanztien is supposedly the castle Walt Disney modeled the castle at Disneyland after. It’s an hourish drive from Munich, so I must get on my way...

... Neuschwanztien is really cool. It is located a ways up a hill, so to get there mom and decided to take a horse and buggy. Our horses were named Olga and Peter. They worked fairly well as a team, although on occasion our driver wanted them to go faster. It was sort of funny. All she had to do was make it so they saw the whip in her hand and their pace would significantly quicken.

The views from around the castle are insane. I didn’t realize that there would be a million and one trails you can hike around on the “grounds” of the castle but there are. (It puts Pisgah to same Jami.) These aren’t traditional castle grounds with moats, and manicured lawns but rather more like hiking trails around the base of what I think are the German Alps. Much of our path on this portion of our trip was planned by our friend Jim. He had a great list of highlight places we needed to see in Bavaria. He said his favorite place at Neuschwanstein was the “bridge”. He was right. The view from there is nothing short of spectacular. The views were ever changing on this day because of the different cloud formations. I could have stayed on the bridge for a very long time but we had to get going in order to make our alloted tour time of the castle.

The castle tour was sort of pathetic by typical standards. It was a walking tour with a guide that lasted 35 minutes. He didn’t offer all that much information about the place but getting to see the inside of the castle was still worth it. One fun fact I learned from a random tour guide on the walk back down the hill was that Michael Jackson evidently tried to buy the Castle at some point for $30 million but the powers that be, obviously, told him no.

We ate mom’s birthday lunch/dinner at a nice traditional German place at the base of the castle. It was fun to be able to celebrate directly below one of the most famous castles in the world. After eating we set out on a bit of a hoop hunting adventure. I wanted to see if I could capture a hoop with the castle and/or one that captured the essence of Hohenschwangau. I think was decently successful on both fronts.

Our last thing to accomplish today was to drive to the town of Konstanz. It was roughly a two hour drive from Hohenschwangau and not without adventure. About 50KM from Konstanz we drove under a bunch of power lines. At the same moment all of the electronics in our car shorted. The radio, the GPS, and the dashboard all went momentarily dark. It was nuts. The dash quickly returned but the the GPS and radio appeared to be fried. I had a general idea of where were we going but I had no idea how to find the hotel. Eventually we decided to pull over and see if stopping and restarting the car would help. It did, for 15 minutes or so. We then stopped and restarted again. This not only didn’t reset the system but now the dash lights and radio wouldn’t go off when the key was removed and the car was locked. We decided to drive a while longer and see if the car would cure itself. It appeared that it did. The third time we stopped the GPS started working again and safely led us to our hotel.

Tonight we are staying in the Apartment Hotel Konstanz. It is like a little apartment and a gynormous by European standards. It even has like 12 foot ceilings. The people at the front desk were super friendly and got us quickly settled. For the first time on this trip I actually have wireless in the room which is great. We just finished video Gchatting with dad. Kudos to him for getting it to work with limited tech support. We are tired after a fun birthday day, so I’m calling it a night.

Katy