Castles and Palaces Everywhere



We have found that it is impossible to travel anywhere in Germany without seeing a castle on some hilltop overlooking a river. In Bavaria there are also numerous palaces that were built over the many years to house the rich and famous. We spent the last number of days traveling through Bavaria getting our fill of these incredible places and have begun to experience something called 'castle fatigue'. Suddenly stopping the car to take another picture of another castle isn't as important as the novelty has begun to wear off. We visited Neuschwanstein Castle in Fussen, Bavaria which is the ultimate tourist trap. It was being renovated and was surrounded by scaffolding. Matthew was the only one who hadn't taken a tour of it before but he had seen the Neuschwanstein Lego Castle at Legoland so he didn't feel the need to walk up to the real thing. King Ludwig II who built it should have settled for his Dad's castle across the valley Hohenschwangau which is beautiful as well. We decided to move on and instead take a tour of one of Ludwig's other palaces Linderhof. It was the only palace of the three he had built that he actually finished. He even had a grotto built into the mountainside so he could float in his little fake cave in his boat to get away from it all. He drowned under mysterious circumstances before he could finish Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee and bankrupt the country. We spent some time walking the muraled streets of Oberammergau (is it my imagination or do they use a ton of Miracle Grow on their overflowing flowerboxes) before heading to Salzburg, Austria. Even though we had constant rainfall while we visited Salzburg, we still could see why it is so popular with tourists. There is a castle in the middle of the city that overlooks everything called Hohensalzburg. It seems the perfect backdrop for any picture of the city. This is the city of Mozart and Sound of Music and everywhere you turn there are people selling something related to those two themes. We wandered around and accidentally ended up visiting a few familiar sights from the movie such as the cemetery. Our highlight was meeting our Mennonite Your Way host Mariette Wejwoda and finding out - a) she is a Janzen from Saskatchewan b) she hosted Connie Wiebe and Judy Wiens (Winkler friends of ours) in 1989 and c) she is invited to attend the Rempel Reunion next summer which means she is related somehow to Elaine (start humming 'It's A Small World After All'). With Mennonites it seems to be one degree of separation instead of six. On our return trip to Heidelberg, we stopped in at the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber which is maintained to look like a sixteenth century town. This is where I attended Goethe Institute in 1991 but, alas, the school is now a Montessori School. We took in a medieval festival in Hirschhorn when we got back to Heidelberg which seemed to complete our time nicely in this land of castles and palaces.