Garmish-Partenkirchen, Day 2
Today was a busy day. We wanted to visit the Neuschwanstein castle (the castle of Mad King Ludwig II), but I was not able to get tickets for the day. They have some tickets they sell the day of, but you have to get in line early. So we left the house at 6:30 am to drive to the castle and got in line by 7:45 am for the ticket office that opened at 8:00. There was already quite a line of people, even in the rain, and when we finally got to the front we were able to get tickets for entry at 11:05. It was so very cold and we had over two hours to wait, so we went into one of the restaurants and got some hot chocolate. After about 45 minutes of getting to sit inside and warm up we went to walk through the tourist shops. Most of the stores weren’t even opened yet, so we then walked to the lake. Ronin even found a painted rock!
Although we didn’t visit the inside, we had good views of Hohenschwangau castle, which was the childhood home of King Ludwig II. Willow thought that since the king lived in the big castle we visited that the queen lived in the yellow castle. The tour guide chuckled when Willow asked if this was where the queen lived.
We took the special bus up to Neuschwanstein castle. It lets you off a ways above the castle, so you have to walk down. This wasn’t a big deal; at least we weren’t walking up! The iconic photo of the castle is usually taken from Mary’s Bridge, but this was closed right now for renovations. We were able to take a nice picture from behind the bridge, which you can see below. It was a little foggy so the pictures aren’t too clear, but it was the best we could get in a day with weather like today. You aren’t allowed to take photos inside the castle, but the outside is stunning itself. The front has red stone, and the inside courtyard has yellow. The rest is mostly greyish, and believe it or not this was the inspiration for the castle in Disneyland.
We left the castle and drove past Wieskirche, or the pilgrimage church of Wies, a beautiful rococo church built in the 1700s. This white, pink, and gold church was absolutely stunning with the amount of detail in the ornamentation and ceiling paintings. I decided I really like these bright and airy churches that are white and pink instead of the dark colors commonly seen in Italy. This church was so exciting because it was sitting in the middle of nowhere miles from a large town, which is in contrast to most of the fancy churches we have been to which are located in the middle of large cities.
Because I had missed tickets to the salt mines a few days ago, I made tickets for today for 4:30 pm. We had almost 3.5 hours to get back to Berchtesgaden, which on GPS says it takes 2.5 hours. However, thanks to extreme traffic and a really bad accident, it took us extra long to get there. We were supposed to be at the salt mines 15 minutes early, instead, we were 10 minutes late. We absolutely ran from the parking lot to try to make it in time. The ticket window was closed and the woman in the gift shop sent us to the supervisor around the corner. After some big puppy dog eyes from the kids and pleading from JonPaul, the supervisor decided to let us do the tour! I am so glad, because I thought we had just driven over 3.5 hours just to turn around and go home. We put on the special mining outfits and got on a mining train to take a long ride into the mine. You aren’t allowed to take pictures in the mines, so I have a few pictures from outside of the mine. We went through several tunnels, learned all about the mining process (both current and the history of mining), and learned about the different kinds of salt. There were two big slides that you went down to get to the bottom levels, and that was really fun! I was surprised to hear the mine was still an active mine but only had about 25 people working because of all the automated processes. The kids really liked the salt mines, and I agree it was pretty cool. Even though it was a long day of driving (well, for JonPaul since the rest of us got to just sit in the car), I think it was well worth it to backtrack to go to the mines.
On the way back to Garmish, the views were beautiful, especially with the sun finally peaking out from behind those clouds. Do I see some blue sky up there?!?
