The Romantic Road - part 2

On Friday, we took the Romantic Road south. Imagine the alps in the distance, edelweiss blooming in a meadow, an old man in lederhosen yodeling in the background. That's the part of Germany we went to. I may be exaggerating, but the clear, sunny skies made the whole scene a little more... romantic.

View from our gas station stop

We started in the town of Fuessen, at the foot of the German Alps. It sits on the road that the ancient Romans used to cross the Alps. Fuessen has a quaint pedestrian old town and a shop, that I stopped in, filled with only cuckoo clocks. We walked up a hilltop to see the town castle and happened on a monastery from the 900s called St Mang. The church on the site was ornate, empty, and filled with artwork of St George the dragon-slayer and his rival dragons. I am not sure why the monks chose to fill their church with dragons, except that it seems like one might climb out of a cave in the valley below Fuessen and try to eat a few princesses.

Fuessen

St. Mang Basilica

St. Mang Basilica

Did I mention that the sun was shining? It was, which gave us a great opportunity to see the two castles nearby: Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. Both castles belonged to crazy King Ludwig of Bavaria. Apparently once Bavaria joined Germany in the mid 1800s, Ludwig decided to spend all the royal family's money on building elaborate castles. Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland was modeled after Neuschwanstein, and it is right out of a fairly tale.

Neuschwanstein Castle

Neuschwanstein Castle

By the time the castle was built in the 1880s, Ludwig was in serious debt. After he died, the castle was opened to paying visitors and the debt was paid off a decade later. So this place has been a tourist trap for over one hundred years. Today you can take a bus or a horse-drawn carriage up the hill to the castle, or you can walk like we did. You need to burn off that spaetzle somehow.

Hohenschwangau Castle

The last stop on our excursion to the south was to Reutte, Austria. Our main motivation to go was so that I could say I'd been to Austria and scratch it off of our scratch-off world map. After much debate, my parents and I decided that it would not count if I didn't get out of the rental car and actually set foot in Austria. So we decided to get cake. We found the place in Reutte where the grandmas meet for coffee. It seemed to be the Alpine version of the Elmwood Family Restaurant near my Grandma's house.

We drove back safely past the castles and through Fuessen without being eaten by dragons. The scariest thing was navigating bad German pop radio and getting back into Augsburg in pre-game soccer traffic.