Europe Trip: Tourists in Germany (Part II)

Thursday, July 1, was the longest day of our trip, and the kids handled it like champion travellers.

We awoke in Gunzburg, and when the gates of Legoland Deutschland opened at 10, we were there.  The kids had a terrific time in the park.  It's a small park; there's really only one roller coaster to speak of, and David certainly has ridden more terrifying ones.  But we had a great time exploring: I loved seeing the mini-Europe scenes, all made from Legos.  I remembered being a kid, playing with Legos, and hearing of a magical place in Denmark where they had this park filled with miniature replicas of famous places in Lego.    To see it in person was terrific.

We rode the rides, we splashed in the water rides, we saw the Lego safari (all the animals made of...well, you know), we ate lunch in the restaurant (one of the few places where I just pointed blindly at the menu and said, "I have no idea what this is, but bring it to me anyway."), we shopped in the store...and by 2:00 we were done with what we wanted to do in Legoland.

We hopped in the car and drove southwesterly towards Neuschwanstein, the fairy-tale castle of King Luwig II of Bavaria in the 1860s.  Coming upon the Alps was tremendous: they just rise, almost vertically, without warning, on the horizon.  We made our way to the tiny town at the base of the castle, and bought our tickets in the mid-late afternoon.

To get to the castle, you can walk uphill for 45 minutes, or take a horse-drawn carriage, or take a bus.  Mary, ever the romantic, wanted to take the horse-drawn carriage, so we did.  The horse puffed us up to the top of his route, at which time we were told to climb that path over there, uphill, about another 10 minutes.  (On the way back, Mary said, enough of the climbing, let's take the bus...so we followed the trail to the separate bus stop, which turned out to be--you guessed it--uphill as well.)

Neuschwanstein is enormously tall, and suitably imposing when you arrive.  But inside, it's largely unfinished, so we could only tour certain rooms--fortunately, the glamorous throne room and king's apartments were part of it.  The throne room was just ridonculous: gold leaf everywhere, mosaics, marble...so over-the-top as to make Versailles look almost reasonable by comparison.  But the castle sits on this absolute precipice: to the south the rock walls just fall away, hundreds of feet, to the river below in the chasm.  It's truly amazing to think how it got built in the first place.

We stayed and toured longer than I had anticipated, so it was late by the time we got back down the mountain, and later still by the time we made it to Munich for our last night in Germany.  I returned the car just at 9:00, then we got McDonalds at the train station across the street from our hotel.  I am amazed at the amount of mayonnaise the Germans think a Big Mac needs.  The kids found the ketchup to be not quite right, too.

Our hotel that night was easily the worst of the entire trip.  The 1st Creatif Hotel Elephant got chosen for its location, so we could drop the car off, then walk easily to the train station for our train to Paris in the morning.  Little did we realize the room was tiny, and it had no a/c on a hot summer's evening.  We had to leave the window open, which of course meant all the urban street sounds crashing into our room.  None of us got any sleep that night, so we were really ready for our train the next morning.  Paris, here we come!