This is the painful part
Breakfast is a buffet served in the restaurant so it's rolls, yogurt, and cornflakes for the third day in a row - sorry, I'm just not into breakfast meat plates. Our waitress' English is about as good as my German, so I finally get to belch out a few phrases - almost a whole conversation - im Deutsch.
 |
 |
| There's eleven million shots of Schloß Neuschwanstein
itself elsewhere I'll stick to shots of the rest of the experience. |
A couple wrong turns later, we get to Königsschloßer at 9:30AM - just in time, it turns out, as more than a few tour buses are piling in and emptying. We elect to take the 20 minute walk up the hill to Neuschwanstein, get in line to buy tickets, buy tickets, walk another ten minutes up to the castle, then get in line for the tour.
Forty-five minutes later, we get the 35-minute tour - our guide is professional and polished but maybe a little bored by the whole thing by now. The castle was significantly less impressive inside than out - Ludwig died (in the Oliver Stone version, he was offed by his ministers) before it could be completed - but being rather a late entrant to the castle game it has running water and all mod cons including a very impressive kitchen, which is probably the most interesting part about the interior.
By this time we're rapidly closing in on noontime and the crowds are still growing so we elect to skip Hohenschwangau - unfortunate, as I expect it's more of a 'real' palace than Neuschwanstein - and hit the road again. A couple miles along, we stop to tank up at an Agip - $60 for 3/4 tank. You see, this is why Germans don't drive 540is.
Back on the Deutsche Alpenstrasse - traffic is moderate, but we miss a couple of turns and have to backtrack. Some of the towns past Fussen look like nice places to stay. We stop in at a roadside diner at Alpsee and have lunch. Unimpressive-looking place, but the menu's interesting - I order spaghetti, Eva orders calamari, and wonder of wonders, it's all good. The bathrooms are even clean.
A further few pretty and uneventful hours down the road, we follow the signs to the Friedrichshafen ferry terminal. We parked in the shopping-center next door, walked through the port shopping area for a while, toured the Zeppelin Museum. The museum, with its reconstructed section of Hindenburg passenger cabins, its Maybach engine cutaways, and a variety of other exhibits is impressive if you're really into airship history, grossly boring otherwise, which meant I enjoyed it but Eva was bored out of her gourd. Be warned - maybe 30% of the exhibit content has enough English-interpretation to get you by if you don't already know what you're looking at. Foolishly, I missed my chance to pick up a Zeppelin NT polo shirt at the gift shop.
Back to the car, we pull out of the garage, make a wrong turn and end up a quarter-mile out of the way getting back to the ferry terminal next door. Park in one of the PKW (Personen Kraft Wagen, or passenger car to us Americans) lanes and hike back to the ticket booth. When the girl at the counter asks what kind of auto, English pops out of my mouth - "Bee Em Dubbl-U". Quizzical look. "Bay Em Vay". That's better. I roam around the Zoll building looking for a customs agent, just to make sure they're going to let us on the boat with the car - but there's no one to be found.
 |
Once the boat docks, we drive out to board, and for the first and last time this trip (until Orly, at least) we encounter customs. As expected, our weird manufacturer-export plates catch their attention. The first agent doesn't speak any English, and my German only just gets the job done - he checks our passports and takes them back to the office. A younger guy comes out, asks us for the car's papers - we show him what we have, he picks a couple, takes them back to the office. A couple minutes later both reappear, hand us back the freshly-stamped papers, compliment us on the car, and we drive through and onto the ferry.
Swiss driving is tame - we cruise through a few towns, catch the highway, proceed onward through Zurich (surprising amount of graffiti there) and on to Interlaken without incident. We drive through town; on the way I decipher enough of a radio story to figure out that Alan Shepard has been found dead at his home. Eva doesn't believe me, but it's on CNN later.
After a few wrong turns that take us mostly back through downtown Interlaken, out, and through town a second time, we get to our hotel by the Thunersee just as the hotel office is closing up. The place is clean, and the location tremendous, but the walls are paper-thin and we have a family next door conversing loudly in some undetermined Central European language - not too promising. As with the Post Hotel in Mittenwald, the room décor last got a significant update about twenty-five years ago.
Eva's very hungry by this point, and we drive back into Interlaken arguing about what to eat. It's 9PM and, after finding a bunch of restaurants in the process of closing up for the night, we stop at a snack shop whose menu advertises just about everything imaginable from Döner Kebab to burgers. Judging by what we got, it all sucks. We decide we're still hungry and continue walking, eventually coming across an Italian restaurant - Di Rafmo or some such - still open. After downing a serviceable pizza and (in my case) a sizeable beer we return to hotel and pass out. It's been a very long day.