After 18 months of travel, we'd begun to feel like we'd seen a good chunk of Europe. One thing that was really missing, though, was Germany. We'd spent two days in Munich back on our group trip to Austria, but that was it, and we really felt like we needed to give it a little more time, especially considering that at least part of my family heritage comes from there. So, we decided to take the long Easter weekend (the English get Friday and Monday as national holidays) to tour around Bavaria - one of the southern states of the country. As the title of this post implies, we also made our way to a couple of other locations as well...
Friday, April 2nd
The hub of Bavaria is Munich, so although we'd already been, it was both our starting and ending point as it had the best deals on flights. We arrived early Friday morning, picked up our rental car (a Mercedes, but don't get too excited...pretty much the Smart car version of a minivan), and hit the road heading north.
Here we got our first experience with the autobahn. For those that might not know, the autobahn is simply the German highway system, similar to the Interstate, and is famous for having no speed limit. While it was pretty amazing, I must admit that I was slightly disappointed. For one, a little known fact is that there are actually speed limits. If it is dark or raining they enforce speeds similar to those in the US. Also, there are limits on some sections near cities for safety reasons. Even so, it was pretty awesome. There were several stretches where the general flow of traffic was 100 mph. And while Jenna didn't like me to go much faster than that, there were a few times where she dozed off and I had the freedom to literally floor it. Sadly, our poor family car wasn't the fastest thing out there, so I only ever got it up to 130. It was fun but a little frightening - you just don't feel as safe when your flying along at that speed and the car is shaking!
With the high speeds, we were able to make some great time to our destination - Rothenburg ob der Tauber. This small town sat on an important trade route, and the markets (and taxes that followed) made it a rich town. In the middle ages, it was the 2nd largest city in Germany, so it had many great buildings and a wonderful cathedral. In the 1600's, though, the city fell to a siege, and shortly thereafter was hit by the plague, and almost overnight the wealth and power of the city vanished. It sat in squalor for hundreds of years with no growth as the inhabitants eeked out whatever living they could. Then, around the turn of the century, the city was discovered as being a great example of a medieval walled German city, and tourists started to come see it. The 300 years the city spent in poverty became a great asset - not having any money to expand or modernize has created what is now known as the best example of a medieval city, and it now draws over 2 million visitors (and their wallets) every year.
We had a really fun time here. It was Good Friday so lots of the shops were closed (including a very famous Christmas shop), but we had a great time just walking through the town. It was what you would imagine a town would have been like 400 years ago - big squares and old wooden houses. We took Rick's tour, which led us through all the market squares, past the old mansions, and up along the city wall (which was really cool). The highlight of the day, though, was inside the cathedral - St Jakob's Kirche.
It was pretty plain inside, but the altar was very cool. It was very ornate with carvings of the crucifixion and some of the saints with paintings on the side panels. The best part of the church, though, was the smaller altarpiece that they had hidden upstairs behind the pipe organ.
This is the Altar of the Holy Blood and was carved by the "Michelangelo of German woodcarvers". The detail on this carving was unbelievable, down to the nails in the horse's shoes. I don't think we've really seen many artistic carvings before - at least not on this scale - and we were thoroughly impressed.
While the church was a great experience, it paled in comparison to our evening activity - the Night Watchman Tour. Back in medieval times, all cities had a few men who would roam the streets at night to make sure all was safe - the night watchmen. Carrying a tall pollaxe and a lantern, they would make sure that there were no dangers of attack from without, and there was no trouble caused by rowdy citizens within.
He basically just takes you on a walk through the city, giving the history of how it became rich, and then how it became poor, and then how it became a tourist trap, but it is amazing. He's German but his English is flawless, and the mix of humor and history that he uses had us rolling with laughter and also had us walk away with a large amount of knowledge about the place. The city should definitely be paying this guy a salary, because we couldn't say enough about how great it was - by far the highlight of the town and something that will probably bring us back one day.
Saturday, April 3rd
We started off Saturday with some Rothenburg shopping. There is a world famous Christmas shop here called Kathe Wohlfahrt (named for its founder) that sells a vast assortment of ornaments and other sundry decorations. Along our travels we had been trying to buy a Christmas ornament or some kind of decoration for a souvenir and this was the perfect place to buy one for Germany! It had been closed for Good Friday, so before heading out of town we made a stop, and came away with some pretty good swag.
We hit the road by mid-morning and headed off for our 2nd country of the weekend - France. Our destination was the small town of Colmar, but based on the travel writings of our GEP friends Kirk and Reid, we stopped first in Freiburg, Germany, a mid-sized city near the Franco-German border to see their church. It was like many others on the inside, but the entrance was spectacular, and definitely worth the stop-over.
We've never seen such a colorful and ornate church entrance - just wish the bird netting hadn't screwed up all the pictures!
We made it to Colmar, just across the French border, by mid afternoon. This place hadn't originally been in our Germany plans...at least until Jenna fell in love with the place through Kirk and Reid's blog post of their journey there. In many ways it was similar to Rothenburg in that it is a cute town with a lot of history and a lot of very old historic buildings. This town didn't have quite as hard a life, though, so they had some more modern touches like a pedestrian "high street" with all the modern shops. It was a little odd to see these old 3-story buildings where the top two were half-timbered and the bottom was steel and glass and occupied by H&M.
Our first stop on our visit was the Unterlinden Museum. This building was erected as a convent in the 1200s, so the architecture alone was pretty stunning. There was a large cloister with various galleries surrounding it. Most of the galleries were pretty good, but the highlight (and half the reason we came to Colmar) was the Isenheim Altarpiece.
The other panels were very good as well.
We left the museum and spent the evening touring through the town, seeing some interesting buildings and getting a little bit of the history of the place. We'll spare you the history, but give you a few of the pictures:
Sunday, April 4th
We had a long day of driving ahead of us on Sunday. We'd see 5 countries in one day of driving, so we knew we needed an early start.
We headed south from France (#1) into Switzerland (#2), where we were immediately greeted by a friendly border patrol officer and a 20 euro fee bill for a "toll sticker". This sticker is required to drive on the highways, and it is valid for one year, which made us happy since we'd be spending a total of about 3 hours driving in the country. We were a little peeved at the price, but considering that we ended up driving across half the country it wasn't so bad, and considering what we'd pay later in the day I guess we should have been happy.
We started at the northern tip of Switzerland in Basel (where we Christmassed in 2008) and drove about 170 miles southeast through Zurich to the small country of Liechtenstein (#3), which was our primary destination for the day.
Liechtenstein is one of the smallest countries in the world, basically one city, and a couple of small villages nestled between Switzerland and Austria - in total about 60 square miles with a population of 35,000. Since it happened to be Easter Sunday, pretty much the entire country was shut down when we arrived, but that was okay - we were only here for one reason...
That, of course, is me getting my passport stamped - the main tourist activity in Liechtenstein!! And yes, we were in the tourist office - they don't actually have anyone at the border, so you have to come here (and pay a small fee) if you want that stamp. There wasn't a ton to do here, so we pretty much popped in, got our passports stamped, and headed back out on the road, checking one more European country off the list.
We hopped back on the highway, headed north toward the Austro-German border. Our route took us on a 13 mile section of highway in Austria (#4) which will forever be remembered as the most expensive stretch of road in the world. As we entered Austria, we saw a border station, where we stopped but found it to be completely un-manned (which isn't unusual, as you generally don't get your passport checked when travelling from one EU country to another by car), so we just drove on. A few minutes longer, and we came upon the German border leaving the country, where we found the Austrian border station fully staffed. We were asked immediately where our toll sticker was, which of course we didn't know existed. As it turns out, to drive on the Austrian highways you have to buy a toll sticker similar to the one we bought in Switzerland. It just costs about $10 for a week's use, and can be purchased at any gas station or at the border when you enter the country (if the station has guards, that is). If, however, you don't get the sticker, the fine is 120 Euro (about $160), which we had to promptly pay or face a trip to court. So, our trip through the country cost us just over $12 per mile - quite frustrating!!
After taking a second to vent my anger, we threw up our hands saying "C'est la vie" (we'd been in France this morning), and crossed over to Germany (#5). At least we had pretty scenery along the drive. After about another hour's drive to the east, we found ourselves at our destination - the border town of Fussen, where we walked around a little seeing the city's old castle and a nice waterfall. We were in this area basically as a place to sleep, with plans for activities the next day, so we headed to our hotel for the evening (actually across the border back to Austria in a little town called Reutte, but not on the highway so no toll required!!).
Monday, April 5th
The last day of our trip was spent seeing some famous castles that are in this southern part of Bavaria - Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. Both were castles of the ruling family of Bavaria. The first was the real "home" that the family lived in in the 19th century, so we started with a tour of this one. It was very nice, as far as large extravagant castles go, and along with the views of the countryside we got some interesting information about the family and life of the royals at the time. In short - the castle was built by a King Maximillian, whose son, Ludwig, later inherited.
You may have heard of "mad King Ludwig". If so, its this guy. The "mad" comes from the fact that he died at age 41 under some mysterious circumstances, being one day after he was deposed as king and deemed insane. Some argue that he was just a bad king - taxing the people to build his castles, and that they didn't like that much, so the called him crazy, kicked him out, and maybe even killed him.
The second castle was the main attraction - Neuschwanstein. This castle was built by King Ludwig as his most extravagant "fantasy" castle. This was the model used by Walt Disney when he designed the Disneyland castle, so when every little girl dreams of one day becoming a princess, this is the castle that they're dreaming of living in.
Although the castle looks great from the outside, only about 1/3 of the interior was ever completed. Construction stopped when Ludwig died, and literally six weeks later the castle opened to tourists. We enjoyed touring the castle, but the views from outside were what made the trip worth while. Especially those from the bridge in the mountains above the castle.
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