The great oppressive Arabian summer has started. And summer always brings back memories of Europe. I’m continuing with our Europe Trip 2015 story from where I stopped the last time,
Liechtenstein. From there onwards, it was a continuous spell (well, almost) of
rain and fog for the rest of our trip. The day after Liechtenstein, we did the stupidest thing in our lives. No, actually it was a series of stupid things, all in one day!
Gloomy weather over Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany
From
Liechtenstein, we headed to Bavaria, Germany. We booked a night in a hotel in a little village called Schwangau, near Füssen in the Bavarian Alps. We were there for only one reason, to visit the famous fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. Neuschwanstein is the inspiration behind many of the fantastical castles you see in the Disney cartoons. It’s also the inspiration behind Disneyland’s main castle, which you’ll now see every time you watch a movie from Walt Disney Pictures! I’ve visited Neuschwanstein Castle before, way back in the summer of 1994, during my student backpacking trip. I remembered it to be a fabulous day when we visited. Clear sunny skies, fresh mountain air, not hot, not cold. Perfect! It was one of the most memorable days of the trip. That’s why I had to bring the missus (and the kids) to see this magical castle.
Except for the thick blanket of clouds in the sky, everything went OK at first. We woke up very early in the morning (earliest we ever woke up during our entire Europe trip of 14 days). We wanted to get to the ticket booth before 8.30am, as advised by the travel books (there’ll be long queues, the tours are guided, with a limited number of people per guide, and so on, and so forth). The ticket booths are about 2 km away from where we stayed. But what the heck, we have a car!
We finished breakfast close to 8.30am and decided that we’ll come back later to check out. (After all it’s ONLY 2 km away). We had no problems reaching Hohenschwangau where the ticket booths are, queued up and got tickets for Neuschwanstein Castle and Hohenschwangau Castle. Yes, there’re actually 2 castles in the area, and there’s a gap of about 2 to 2.5 hours between the guided tours, I think 10.00am for Hohenschwangau and 12.30pm for Neuschwanstein, something like that. The ticket includes horse carriage rides / bus rides to the castles! Great, no worries!
The kids and I, Hohenschwangau, Bavaria, Germany
Neuschwanstein Castle above the village of Hohenschwangau
Just look at the number of tour buses in Hohenschwangau!
We then proceeded to nicely waste our time, and about 15 minutes before the time of our Hohenschwangau Castle tour, asked about getting onto the horse carriage. “Oh, the trip only takes 8 minutes.” “When’s the horse carriage coming?” “Oh, in about 15 minutes.” “Huh? But our tour is in 15 minutes’ time!” “Well, you can walk. It’ll take 10 minutes if you walk fast, up those steps.” We ran, carrying a baby, and a pram, and pulling a 6 year old kid, who knows nothing about what urgency is. And reached, just in time, to join the rest of our tour group. “Whew, that was close!”
From the grounds of the Hohenschwangau Castle
A swan fountain – the people here are crazy over swans. Every other thing is named after swans (Schwan in German) e.g. Neuschwanstein (New Swan Stone), Hohenschwangau (High Swan Land), Schwangau (Swan Land)
Neuschwanstein Castle, seen from Hohenschwangau Castle
The Hohenschwangau Castle visit was over in about umm 30 – 40 minutes. There was still about 2 hours till our Neuschwanstein tour. We promised the hotel that we’d check out at 12pm. If we waited till after our Neuschwanstein tour, it would be way past 12pm. Since we had so much time in hand (and thinking that we’re marathon runners), we decided to walk back to the hotel, 2km away. After all, the German countryside looked so pretty, even in cloudy weather. There goes another stupid decision.
After 20 minutes of walking, joking and taking lots of photos of the pretty countryside (yeah, even in gloomy weather), we realized that we had walked barely 300m. OK, so what, it’s only 2km and if we take the car, we’ll have to pay the parking fees again, and there may be no more spaces to park when we return (actually, there’re tons of spaces, but just a little further off). And so, we made a stupid decision to stick to our earlier stupid decision.
After about 50 minutes of walking briskly, we reached the hotel panting. We packed up hurriedly (that’s how I lost my phone charger), paid and proceeded to head back to Hohenschwangau. There’re buses to Hohenschwangau from Schwangau, we thought about waiting at the bus stop, but every person we asked had no idea when the next bus would come and our visit was in about 30 minutes’ time. We decided to abandon the bus stop (which we would later learnt to be another stupid decision) and jogged, ran and panted our 2km back to Hohenschwangau, with pram, baby, kid and high heels (Anu had to have high heels on a day like this!) And did we reach in time? Of course not. The bus from Schwangau overtook us about 10 mins before we reached our destination. Damn! Should’ve waited. (Told ya it was a stupid decision).
The nice road connecting Hohenschwangau to Schwangau, where our hotel was - It's 2km long. Notice high heels on Anu? Imagine walking the entire distance, and back, in an hour, in those shoes? That's what girls can do
And that’s not all yet. We learnt that to get up to the entrance of Neuschwanstein Castle from where we were, is another friggin 1.5km on a steep hill road (didn’t look that high to us?!?) This would take able adults, wearing hiking shoes (instead of high heels), 30 minutes to walk up. Either that, or wait for the bus… And since we had already screwed up our entire visit, what the heck, we decided to wait for the bus. But not all is lost. When we reached the castle, we learnt that we could still go in! We just had to reschedule our ticket with the officer in charge.
We got it rescheduled, Group No. ummm 241 or something like that. I told the wife, “Honey, there’s good news and bad news. Good news is that, yes, we’ll still be able to visit. Bad news is that we’ll have to wait till bloody 4.30pm, …over 3 hours to wait.” What I didn’t realise at that time, was that the officer had actually written 14:30, not bloody 4.30! What in the world made me think it was 4.30pm, still beats me to this very day. Anyway, we proceeded to waste more time, since we had such a long wait ahead of us. And then, for some reason or other, I had a peek at the Electronic Display Board and saw them calling our Group No, …241. “Can’t be, it’s only two-ish…” and that’s when it dawned on me! I quickly reached for the ticket, and saw it written, in clear German handwriting, friggin 14.30! We ran for our lives, for the fourth time in the day, and reached just before the rest of our group disappeared through the entrance. We were in such a hurry that we didn’t notice the free audio guides at the door. But we got in! And that’s what matters, right? For the next 30 minutes or so, when everyone was deeply engrossed in their headphones on what it was saying, we made up our own stories… “Oh, this was where the fairy godmother stayed, …and that’s the stairway to the room that had that spindle that put everyone to sleep, …and that’s where the magic mirror of the wicked queen was kept, etc”. Until someone from our group started staring daggers at us and showing that shush, finger on the lip sign. “Spoilsport, why can’t you just concentrate on what that headphone of yours is talking about…”
Oh well, at least we didn’t waste our trip. But the weather was horrible (it started raining in the afternoon during and after our trip, and Marienbrücke (Marie’s Bridge), which was one of the nicest place to view the castle, was closed for maintenance! (What a bummer, why can’t they wait till off-peak season for maintenance??!) Auf Wiedersehen, Neuschwanstein. If we ever meet again, I hope it’ll be in better circumstances.
Schloss (Castle) Neuschwanstein, Bavaria, Germany
The countryside, from Schloss Neuschwanstein – with a view of the Hohenschwangau Castle in the distance
Here’s a photo of Neuschwanstein I found from the web which shows Neuschwanstein in its full glory, clear skies and sunshine. Source: http://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/neuschwanstein-castle-germany#neuschwanstein-castle-bavarian-alps
