Neuschwanstein Castle

Many little girls grow up dreaming of becoming a princess in the spirit of Cinderella and Disney's Magic Kingdom. Walt Disney was inspired to build his Magic Kingdom by the creation of another visionary, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. King Ludwig predated Disney's retelling of various fairy tales by a century or so but was himself obsessed with the similar stories from Wagner's operas.

In service to his interest - cough cough read obsession - King Ludwig built Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria (southern Germany, practically on the Austrian border).

It was a *bit* foggy when we visited :)

Stunning, I know, right?  

In all seriousness, a friend of Hubby recommended we visit this site and we set aside a day to make the 4 HOUR DRIVE there.  This was our first real experience with substantial traffic on the Autoban and ended up being a very very long day.  

This is one of our first views of the castle as we followed our GPS:

We continued to follow our GPS which directed us to drive basically TO the castle.  Yeah, that's not allowed.  You have to park down the mountain in this little tourist trap village and either walk, ride a bus or ride a horse-drawn carriage up.  We took the bus.  On a less cold, rainy, and generally "not in the mood to walk" day, the hike would be a pleasant challenge.  The day we visited it was not happening. The bus fare was reasonable and the round trip cost us about 6 € for both of us.

On the bus hitching a ride to the top of the Mountain

A wood carving of the Castle Complex.

Sadly, after the bus dropped us off at the "top" of the mountain, we had to still walk a bit to the castle, along with about 3 thousand other tourists.    

Wifey found the castle most interesting as in Engineering accomplishment.  It's a Castle.  Built into and on top of a Mountain!

Our tour tickets! We had to wait an hour and a half on an English tour.

Don't try and go through before your designated tour time ... the machine is far too smart for that!  

We were on tour 484 ... AKA the English one.

Photos were not allowed inside the Castle on the actual tour.  If you click on the link "Photos" to start this paragraph google image will provide an idea of what we visited.  We viewed the King's Bedchamber, dining room, man-"cave", servant quarters, and some other random rooms.  Most all were decorated with detailed murals and wood carvings and tapestries.  Its no wonder the bankers had King Ludwig declared incompetent so they could stop the outflow of cash.   In all only about 1/3 of the castle's rooms are finished and King Ludwig only spend about 6 months living in this castle.

Another view of the Castle.  

Leaving the castle, we walked back to the bus stop and noticed a side path which we decided to explore while we waited for the next bus.  It took us to a viewing bridge which theoretically allows for a great view of the Castle from the air!  Sadly, the photo which opened this blog was taken from there .... fog blocked our view. Never ones to miss an opportunity to have fun despite disappointment, we still took some photos of the surrounding scenery and ourselves.  

Selfie on the viewing bridge. 

SO FAR DOWN!

Hubby was a trooper for this selfie - the bridge on which we were standing was ... unstable. 

Panorama FTW

We enjoyed our visit to the castle ... mostly because we can have fun pretty well wherever.  That said, would we drive 4 hours each way to see it again ... probably not.  Had we gone during the peak season ... at least for Wifey, the experience sounds like it would have been worse.  Better views without the fog I'm sure but way more people.

One brief addition - Before this trip, but after the ISO Frankfurter sauce trip, Wifey read a blog, Brians Guide to Getting around Germany which focuses, among other things on German traffic laws and procedures. Well, technically she read parts of several blogs before finding the one linked which seemed credible and well written.  

The gained knowledge proved helpful as we ended up following a detour away from the Castle which saved a ton of stress and time.  Our GPS didn't have a record of a particular road outage.  So we followed the U32 signs back to an open road towards home.  Without knowing German detour signage conventions, nothing would have told us to follow these "U" signs.