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I had wanted to spend some time in southern Bavaria, in the mountians. I had been travelling with a couple of people who were going to go on a bus tour to a famous castle, but I didn't want to go on an organized tour. It's not that organization offends me all that much, but the tour buses are all-day affairs and I can't get excited about being locked into doing anything all day, at least if I didn't know about it beforehand. I mean, if you belatedly find that the whole thing sucks, you're stuck.
Well, my crones missed their bus and decided to drive. I'd go along with that. My mission was to sit shotgun and navigate. We checked the AAA map of Germany and headed south an the autobahn.The Alps are nice. As we scooted along, the scenery flowed past and I really enjoyed the view. The castle wasn't marked on our map, so we had to stop along the way and ask for directions. This meant human interaction, which is cool. I took a couple of snapshots and we had some deli sandwiches overlooking some dairy cows grazing in an alpine pasture. I was inspired to break into a verse from "The Sound of Music", but stage fright got the best of me.
Eventually, we blundered our way to the castle. Bonus! There were two castles at this site. We got tickets and waited for our numbers to come up for the english language tour.
Mad Ludwig spent his childhood here. As an adult, he built Neuschwanstein nearby
The tour itself was pleasant. We climbed and decended quite a few staircases to get to the interesting parts of the castle. This was necessary because there is only one floor that Ludwig was able to finish before the Bavarians had him declared insane so that they could take the royal checkbook out of his hands. It seems that building Neuschanstein was costly enough to bankrupt Bavaria, or nearly so. Then, Ludwig went boating on the lake with the royal head-shrinker and both men drowned under highly suspicious circumstances. But I digress. The castle tour included the royal chambers, which were absurdly ornate. Interestingly, the kitchen was quite modern-looking for a castle.
Eventually, we headed for home on the autobahn. Coming into Munich, we discovered that we had no idea how to get back to the hotel. As luck would have it, however, I had my little el-cheapo GPS in my pocket and I had had the rare forethought to have stored the coordinates of the hotel in it. Using the GPS, we made it home Ok. Willie was so impressed that he swore that he was going to buy a GPS as soon as he was able to find one. Upon getting home, I went out for a beer to wash the "trail dust" out of my throat.