Month: October 2016

Our last morning in Füssen and the first day we were actually able to sleep in, which was nice.  Breakfast at Hotel Zum Hecten left a lot to be desired, but it was an otherwise great place to stay.  Almost all of the breakfast was cheese and bread.  This meant I got some cereal to change it up a little bit.  Even my wife, who loves cheese, got a bowl of cereal because she was a little sick of the same stuff over and over.  This is, what I think, caused the events of the hardest day yet.*

Our train didn’t come in ’till about noon so we hung out and had some coffee at a local cafe to waste some time.  Kind of a nice boring morning.  Only problem was, I didn’t feel right. Something felt off in my stomach.  I took it as food just not settling right and that it would go away.  So I did my best to sit back and relax on our train ride to Munich, excited to finally get off and stay in Munich after passing through it three times already.

When we got to the Hauptbahnhof (Central Train Station) in Munich, nothing was feeling any better, only worse, but I was determined to keep on exploring.  We made our way to the Radius tours office, check them out if you are in Munich because they are the best!  Here is a link to some of their tours if you want to see what they do: Radius Tours.  Anyways, back to the story.  We made our way to the Radius tour office to book all of the tours we wanted to do in our time in Munich!  After doing all of that, I asked the guy working there, who was awesome, where the nearest bathroom was because I was about to hurl everywhere.  He was so nice, he let us use the staff bathroom for free (instead of having to pay a Euro for the public restroom and it was closer).  Now luckily there was no one else in the bathroom because it was bad.  As soon as I made it into a stall and got my backpack off I exploded. Not literally, but everything came out of both ends.  It was just awful. At least it did make me feel a little better, but now we had to find our hotel.

Again, we struggled, I wasn’t feeling well which didn’t help, but we eventually figured out where to go.  We didn’t get that lost this time, which is great!  As soon as we got to the hotel I crashed on the bed.  It felt great being able to lie down cause I just felt achy all over the place.  Then I thought, “Hey, maybe I should take a shower or just sit down in the shower and let water run over me, that will feel good.” As I was sitting in the shower relaxing, something, maybe the hot water, triggered the rest of what was in my stomach to come out. Ugh.

Luckily we didn’t have much else to do that day. I got to enjoy listening to a Fulham win!! Woohoo!  For those that don’t know I support Fulham Football club and it was great to not have to wake up at 7 am to listen to the game.  Excited to see them in person in 1 week! After that, I was feeling better, but definitely not 100% and it was time for our first beer tour.

The beer tour was a lot of fun!  Good people to talk to and even though I couldn’t stomach much, such great beer.  This tour was more about the history of beer in Munich and the history of the Oktoberfest, as our tour took us to the Oktoberfest museum.  Learning about why they do the festival and why everyone is invited!  It is celebrating the Kronprinz Ludwig and his marriage to Princess Therese. Everyone was invited and they liked it so much they wanted to do it again and again!  Even got to “enjoy” a meal in a beer hall even though my drink of choice was water.  So even though I had to skip on some beer, I did get to enjoy some of the small samples, it was a fun tour to learn more about Munich’s history.  Keith (who is from Ireland) was a great tour guide.  Even though it was a little bit rough getting the food poisoning we had a lot of fun in our first night in the place they call “the village with a million people.”

*The culprit for the food poisoning was most likely milk in our cereal, our bodies weren’t used to the unpasteurized milk.

After spending the morning exploring the castles, we decided to go back and check out a few things in Füssen.  There were a couple of sites in the town that we hadn’t seen yet.  This included the Füssen museum and the high castle that stood over the city.  First up was the museum!

The Füssen museum might have been a really awesome thing to explore, but there were a couple of small problems.  First problem was that all of the exhibits had descriptions in German, which makes sense because we are in Germany.  We had an English booklet that described the exhibits but they did not match the exhibits so we spent most of the tour confused.  That problem was dwarfed by our second problem.  The museum was really dark, and my wife and I were the only guests touring all of the exhibits.  The part that gave us the creeps was a “chapel” that we walked into.  After walking in, my wife immediately started freaking out.  We were distracted because we were looking for a point of interest in the chapel, a famous group of paintings depicting the Dance of Death.  It was pointed out in Rick Steve’s book so we urged ourselves past the creepy metal grate that sat in the middle of the floor separating the back room from the front room with the altar.  I didn’t think it was that bad until I realized how cold it was in there.  My wife noticed a dehumidifier humming in the corner and the ominous grate in the floor, which we quickly realized was a crypt!  After catching a quick glimpse of the painting, we quickly crossed back over the crypt, which is from the 8th century, and ran out of the chapel.  Luckily we didn’t find out until later that the cross in the chapel actually had a piece of bones from the town’s patron saint, St Mang.

After quickly scurrying out of the chapel, we made our way around to some more interesting things in the museum.  We found out that Füssen in well-known as lyre makers.  That lead to them producing violins and other string instruments.  Lets just say, we went through that part pretty quickly too.

Then we went off to see Castle #3, though it wasn’t really a castle compared to the others we saw today, more like a fortress. It is called the “Hohes Schloss” or high castle in English.  This one really had some interesting features including a very interesting art gallery full of some really cool paintings.  Almost everything in there was biblical or from history of the town.  This helped us learn more about what they believe and what the town was about back in time.  Also, the walls the castle was painted with a lot of faux architectural details to make it look like there was more too it than just a wall.  It was interesting after seeing castles with those actual features.

After all of this exploring, we were hungry!  So naturally we looked up some highly reviewed places and of all things, we found….an Italian Pizzeria.  Seriously, of all the places to eat that is what we really wanted.  Some good comfort food and it was really good!  The pizza may have been some of the best I have ever had!  The server was also just a joy!  We wanted to sit outside even though it was cold and he kept giving us a hard time for it.  But we were determined to enjoy the small town cafe feel so my wife ordered an Irish Coffee to warm up.  There was even someone who was at the restaurant that worked for a tech company in Palo Alto way back in the day!  He introduced himself and it was fun talking to a German that lived at one point around us!  This was a great way to end our time in this little Bavarian town.  Happy to move on to Munich tomorrow!  So much more exciting history to learn!

Today we woke up nice and early to catch our bus to the castles!  The best part about staying in Füssen is that you get this thing called the Füssen pass which lets you take any of the public transport in the area for free!  This made our bus trip up to where the castles are totally free!  Getting to the castles, you see their beauty and can’t help but think,”How the heck did they build these things on top of these big hills/mountains so long ago?”   We got there pretty early by catching the first bus in.  We wanted to make sure that we would beat the crowds. We were there so early in fact that we had some time to wait until the first tour started. This allowed us to hang out on some benches along the shores of the Alpsee, directly translated as Alp lake. I can see how it gets its name as the alps are soaring up around us!  It was great to take a breath and take in the beauty of God’s creation.  Then came the tours!

Castle tour #1, Hohenshwangau: This is the “smaller” of the two castles here, but that didn’t make it any less fascinating!  When you go in, you see art everywhere and each of piece of art has a description above them.  The descriptions were for the visitors to understand what was going on in the art work so they could understand the history that they were seeing.  It was very interesting that the king and queen had their own separate floors and separate sleeping areas.  I did enjoy that the king did have a secret staircase that lead to the queen’s bedroom though.  Overall, Castle #1 was good and it was simple. Another thing that I really enjoyed was the telescope that Mad King Ludwig had to check on the progress of the castle being built higher up on the hill and castle #2 in our castle day, Neuschwanstein.

Castle Tour #2, Neuschwanstein: It started with a long hike up the road to the next castle. After the mile and half uphill hike, we reward ourselves with a snack and some delicious hot chocolate.  We were also rewarded with spectacular views, I guess that is what happens when you walk straight up a hill for a while, which was a great view of the valley below us. Also, we got see up close and personal the amazingness of this castle.

Neuschwanstein, known as the Disney castle because this is the castle that Disney based Cinderella’s castle on.  This castle was the pride and joy of King Ludwig II.  Unfortunately for him though, he did not get to live in it long (6 weeks) before he died and it was never finished.  This castle was worked on for 17 years and many in the Bavarian Government were not happy with Ludwig spending all his time building a castle and had a psychiatrist declare him insane.  Then only a few days after this “Mad” King Ludwig and the psychiatrist ended up dead in a lake….suspicious, I sure think so.  Anyways, back to the castle that Ludwig had built.

It was built as Ludwig’s beautiful countryside “home” as the main place of residence for the king was Munich.  Now home is an understatement because this castle is huge.  Not only is it huge but the views that you get throughout the castle are breath-taking!  A great view of the Alps and the Alpsee was my favorite view as you can see below!

There was so much decadence in here.  He had a throne room built like one in the old days where there was only 1 door in and the painting on the ceiling above signified that there was only God above him, the king.  His bed had wood carvings on it that took 2 years to complete.  Heck he even had running water in his bedroom!  It really is too bad it wasn’t completed because the extra stuff that could have been added would have been that much more amazing!  They said it would have taken them 5 more years to complete the rest of it! After Ludwig died, they turned it into a museum and a place that the public could enjoy. They even still hold parties and performances in the ballroom of Ludwig favorite composer, Richard Wagner.

Overall, it was a super fun day at the castles and the most fun really was hearing the history of what went on with these two spectacular places.  The guides we had were really proud of the German history and what these castles represent.  We then had one more castle and some more things to see back in our home base for this part of the trip, Füssen.

 

Goodbye Salzburg!  It has been great spending time with you! Really though, I did prefer the places just outside of Salzburg because that Austrian countryside is just magnificent!!

Being able to take the railjet to Munich made our ride back there much easier.  No stops, unlike our last train which stopped everywhere!  There were also very few people onboard and it was such a comfy ride!  Then we got some lunch at the Munich train station while we waited for our next train down to the very bottom of Germany to a town called Füssen.  Our train down there was almost completely empty which made it feel like we had a personal ride down to Füssen.  We definitely came at the right time of the year!

Füssen is way out in the German countryside, which is a beautiful setting.  The town with an amazing Alp backdrop, a castle sitting on the hill in the middle of town and a very interestingly colored river running through it (a milky green color).  When we got to Füssen, it was very, very warm, which made carrying all of our gear a little more difficult. We also soon realized that this a very popular tourist town.  All the tourists were already there, they just had come earlier and not on our train.  It was packed as we walked around the cobble stone streets finding our hotel.  Of course, as we ended up doing in every city, we took a wrong turn and wound up spending twice as long walking trying to find our hotel.  The town itself is a cute little town, the main walkway reminded me almost of main street in Disneyland.  It has a lot of what I would think of as old European charm.

After we finally found and checked in to our hotel, which was underneath the high castle, we set off on our Rick Steves Germany walking tour of the town.  There was a lot more interesting stuff in it then we had thought.  The town itself is really quite old.  It dates back to the Roman Empire as this was the first place they would have come after coming out of the alps.  It was really cool hearing about all this history of this small Bavarian town. It is crazy to think that we are visiting places that date back to biblical times!

After our walk around the city, our day ended enjoying a nice Bavarian meal at the restaurant in our hotel.  I got spaetzle with pork while my wife got some fresh river trout.  We giggled at the menu and how it poked fun at those who cannot partake in alcoholic beverages.  The non-alcoholic portion of the drink menu was titled,”For people who don’t drink alcohol, and for those who unfortunately cannot”.  Also,  my wife ordered us a traditional apple pancake dessert which filled us both to the brim and we even had leftovers to bring to our room as we wound down from the day.  All in all, it was very tasty and our first taste of some real German Beer. Just like our other food and beer, it all just tasted so fresh, free of preservatives and of course delicious.

It was a fun day, but nothing too crazy about it, just a simple day really enjoying our time exploring a new part of Germany!  Excited to get to check out the castles tomorrow!

After the Sound of Music tour ended, where they filmed the Do Rae Mi step scene, we decided to check out the stuff on top of the cliff overlooking Salzburg.  You see old town Salzburg is built right up against a cliff face that they have made cuts out of to build stuff and there are some cool things up on top of it.  To get up to the top you have to take an elevator, so that is what we did.  We took an elevator ride up to the top and we were treated with another amazing view (pictured above).  Austria is so full of these.  We made the decision then to take some time and relax a little bit after going, going, going for 3 days straight.  A nice relaxing lunch with this view from atop the cliff was just what the doctor ordered.  It allowed us to pause and reflect on our trip so far, with a great view.  So we spent the afternoon slowing down a little bit, which 100% included some apple strudel or apfelstrudel.  We then ventured back down the elevator and went for a walk along the river back to where the Sound of Music tour had ended.  There is geocache in that park and we were determined to find it.  Unfortunately after a good 25 minutes of searching, we could not find the geocache and decided to get back to being touristy.

We then went back to our hotel to make sure to snag some coffee and coffee cakes and planned out what we should do for dinner……….Indian Food. A weird choice I know, but it was right next to our hotel and had really good reviews! It wasn’t as bad as you might think, I mean India is closer to Austria than America.  The best part was listening to the owner, who is Indian, speaking in German.  That is not something you get to experience everyday.

All in all, it was a day filled with some amazing things.  We learned a lot about Austrian history and were intrigued by some church history and learned a lot about the church in Germany and Austria.  Did you know that if you go to catholic church they take you “tithe” straight out of your paycheck every two weeks if you state that you are catholic??!? Crazy.

This is probably the first day that I really felt happy and content about the trip.  No anxiousness or worrying about making sure we catch this train or that train.  Not much thinking about what we had to do next, but just time to spend exploring the great Earth!  It is finally starting to feel like we are on vacation too and not just a weekend away!  Not worrying about work, or really life at home at all and just taking in the fresh Austrian air and just felling so happy and blessed that we were able to take a trip like this.  The best part, at this point at least, is knowing that we are just getting started. Only 3 days in to an awesome 19 days!