Unlike my last visit to Neuschwanstein, this time I got to visit other sights along the way, like the Linderhof Castle, and Oberammergau. And this time, I got to see the inside of Neuschwanstein, something that I don’t recall ever doing.

Schloss Linderhof was one of the three palaces built by King Ludwig II, and the only one he saw completed. Unlike his father who focused on governing, King Ludwig II preferred his artistic and architectural projects instead. The palace and its extensive grounds were designed to create an idyllic setting, complete with enchanting gardens, water features, and meticulously landscaped terraces. Ludwig drew inspiration from mythology and Wagnerian opera, incorporating themes of fantasy and escapism throughout the palace and its surrounding landscapes.

Along the way to Neuschwanstein, we stopped in a small town of Oberammergau, known for its artistic works. The reason that buildings have murals showing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ because the town is known for the Oberammergau Passion Play.

Käthe Wohlfahrt, a well-known German company selling Christmas themed items, also has a store here to join in the city’s woodcarving traditions.

Schloss Hohenschwangau was built by King Ludgwig II’s father and served as their family’s summer residence. It’s located near the picturesque location near lake Alpsee.

This is where every postcard picture of Neuschwanstein is taken: on the Marienbrücke, a bridge lookout. We walked around the area while waiting for our timed tour entry.

Luckily, the weather was nice, so we had an unobstructed view of the surrounding area.

Schloss Neuschwanstein embodies the visionary dreams of King Ludwig II, who aimed to create a fairytale castle. However, the castle remained unfinished upon the king’s untimely death in 1886. Today, Neuschwanstein stands as a symbol of Ludwig’s artistic and romantic ideals.

Unfortunately, it was forbidden to take pictures of the inside of the castle. I could only post existing content from the public domain. Still, one can still appreciate the interior of Schloss Neuschwanstein. Each room features intricate woodwork, ornate decorations, and vibrant murals referencing chivalry, mythology, and Wagnerian opera. The artistic craftsmanship and attention to detail within the castle’s interior serve as a stunning testament to Ludwig’s unwavering pursuit of beauty and grandeur.

See more photos of Schloss Neuschwanstein here

The main atrium of the castle was probably the most impressive room.

Apparently King Ludwig II was born here.

For some reason, this castle had a Chinese themed room. I’m not sure why.

There is also a room with paintings of various women that were seen as beautiful.

There’s also an artifact or prize that the Bavarian Empire obtained due to their assistance to the French Empire during Napoleon’s battle against the Third Coalition in Austerlitz (Part of the Napoleonic Wars). It’s nice to see a piece of history like that. It’s more interesting to me than seeing the palace itself.

I don’t ever recall seeing stuff like this in other castles like Versailles and Neuschwanstein or if I did, it definitely didn’t stick that well in my head. The architecture of this castle was definitely not the greatest, but what I saw inside was quite different from what I had initially expected.

Link to photo album here

Herrenchiemsee

We took a ferry to some of the islands in the lake. One of them is called the Herreninsel, and on that island there is an unfinished castle, built by King Ludwig II. The castle is called the “Neues Schloss Herrenchiemsee”, which translates to the “New Palace of Herrenchiemsee”.

Ludwig II was inspired by the construction of the French palace of Versailles and so he wanted to build a palace just like it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have quite as much money as Louis XIV, so he couldn’t finish his castle.

I would have liked to take more pictures of the castle, but we were forbidden to take any. From what I can recall, a lot of rooms were modeled after rooms in the Palace of Versailles, except they were unfinished.

Fraueninsel

Another island is the Fraueninsel. On this island, there is a monastery.

Some people also live on this island, but there aren’t many. The houses here are probably vacation homes for rich people.

Leberkäse

For lunch, I had Leberkäse, which is a traditional Bavarian dish. Directly translated, it means liver cheese, but I’m not sure how much liver was in it though. The meat actually consists of corned beef, pork, bacon and onions baked into a shape like a slice of bread. I guess it is Bavarian meatloaf.  The fried egg on top was also a nice touch.  The roast potatoes on the side was also really good.  It’s probably the best way to cook potatoes.

Chiemsee

The weather was really good that day despite the 38°C heat wave weather and the visibility was really good.

The nice thing about Chiemsee is that it isn’t as famous of a travel destination for North Americans and so it makes it a lot less touristy.

Link to photo album here

Since we never got to go to Neuschwanstein because of that rainy day, we went yesterday because it was so sunny.  We all woke up super early to take the 7:17 train out of Stuttgart and I ended up sleeping for most of the journey (sleeping at 1 the night before didn’t help).

Four and a half hours and 3 train transfers later, we arrived in the town of Füssen, and from there we took a bus to Hohenschwangau.  All of these German towns had a really old style of architecture – even older than the ones I see around Stuttgart.  It’s almost as if Band of Brothers used these houses for filming their show.

On the train to Füssen, we could already see that pretty much most people on board were tourists all heading to the same place.  It seemed as if the sole purpose of this town is for tourism, despite its rich history.  The nearby municipalities of Schwangau and Hohenschwangau were the same too.  Tourists were everywhere, and taking photos of everything (myself included).  From Hohenschwangau, we could already look up the hill to see a glimpse of Neuschwanstein Castle and the Bavarian Alps.

We could also see the less popular castle, Hohenschwangau Castle from Hohenschwangau.  By itself, that castle looked really great, but when put beside Neuschwanstein, it just doesn’t compare.

We went to the ticket center to hopefully get tickets for the tour of the inside, and when we reached the ticket counter after 40 minutes of waiting, we found out all the tours we wanted were full.  We even tried to get tours in languages we didn’t know like French because we just wanted to see the inside, but those were full too.  The only ones left were too late in the evening for us to go since it would conflict with our train back.  We had no choice but to only see the outside. 

From the base of the mountain, we proceeded on foot and arrived at the gate of the castle after about 10-15 minutes. For once, the attraction we went to visit wasn’t under some kind of maintenance. Since I had walked up to the castle a lot faster than the rest of my group, I went ahead and went inside to the castle courtyard.

The castle courtyard also had a spectacular view of the surrounding area.  Looking further up the mountain, I could see a lot of parachuters slowly drifting down.  Those people probably had a better view of the castle than everyone else on the ground.  When I went back to the castle gate, I found that the rest of the group still hadn’t caught up yet and I probably spent almost 30 minutes up there.  I had no idea what took them so long, but it turned out that they walked really slow and made a lot of random stops.  After meeting up with them, we walked along the forest trail to the Marienbrücke, and that was where we arrived at the location where all the iconic photos of the castle were taken.  According to Wiki, this castle was the inspiration for Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Before taking any pictures of the castle, we had to fight through the rather large crowd of tourists that also wanted to take these iconic shots for themselves (I can’t say that I wasn’t one of them).  Eventually, I got on and enjoyed the view of the castle and the surrounding area.

After crossing the bridge, I climbed up a hill to get an even better view and that’s when I stumbled on a cross placed on the edge of the cliff.  Apparently, someone had died here and it was probably from falling off the mountain or something.  That made me feel a bit uneasy, since falling off was definitely in the realm of possibility.

From the bridge, we saw that people were down in the gorge and it seemed like a nice place so we took the trail down as well.  On the way down, we passed by a waterfall and two my friends decided that they’d go swimming in it.  The water looked super cold too.  Regardless, they climbed down and started swimming in there in just their underwear.  Some of the tourists walking by were kind of shocked to see that.  Some weren’t very impressed, but others found it amusing.  A funny thing about that was that people didn’t take any pictures of the waterfall because the two swimmers would be ruining the picture.  They swam in there for about 10 minutes before getting back out and once they did, we continued down to the bottom of the gorge.  The water at the bottom was so amazingly clear and looked so clean.  It was reminiscent of the time I went to Banff National Park when I was 10.

Along the shore, people had stacked stones together to build towers and they were scattered everywhere.  I tried building my own, but I failed quite epically.

It was soon time for us to leave for our train back to Stuttgart so we continued following the trail down the mountain.  The path down went along the creek where the water flowed down the mountain and that was quite nice to see.  The way the water crashed down looked kind of like white water rafting, except that there wasn’t enough space for it.

Eventually, the trail led back into town near a residential area.  The houses here too looked really old.  More architectural styles that Band of Brothers probably used.

After about 15 minutes of walking, we ended up back in Hohenschwangau.  From there, we took the train back.  At the train station, I saw the largest mass of people ever waiting for a train.  Pretty much all of these people were tourists too. 

Needless to say, it wasn’t very comfortable on that train.  All the seats had been taken up and most people had to stand in the aisles and that wasn’t great at all.  I ended up standing in the train for about an hour and fifteen minutes.  The train didn’t have air conditioning either, so here we all were, getting blasted by the sun without any ventilation for all the warm bodies in the train.  The loud drunk people and the screaming little kids didn’t make it better either.

After getting off that train to wait for our connecting train in Buchloe, we went to go buy some food at a local cafe.  While buying our food, we chatted with the owner for a little bit and it turned out that he used to work in Vancouver and lived on Robson Street.  Small world.  Unfortunately, we were in a bit of a hurry so we had to just buy our food and go.  Originally, the 20 minutes we had would have been sufficient for buying food, but the guy (not the guy we chatted with, but someone else) trying to give us our bill took the longest time ever doing it.  He literally stood at the cash register and stared out into space as if he didn’t know how to do his job.  Then he’d press a few buttons on the register (wrong buttons), and the machine just gave an unhappy beeping noise.  I had never seen anybody work so slow before.  It’s almost as if he worked with zero efficiency.  Even worse was that he forgot my order too.  My friends ended up sharing their food with me (I was really hungry).  After getting our food, we sprinted back to the train station and caught our train.  On the train back, I ended up sleeping since I was so tired from walking around all day (and was probably still under the effects of sleep deprivation from the night before too).

After my nap, I ended up taking random photos of the countryside and playing cards with the others until we reached Stuttgart again.  It was a nice trip, but it is a shame that we never got to visit the inside of the castle.

More photos here

Last Saturday, our original plan was to go to Neuschwanstein Castle, but while we were on our way there, it started raining really hard.  After seeing the rain go on for more than two hours non-stop, we wondered what the weather would have been like in Schwangau (where the castle is).  We figured it would be raining at the castle too and it wouldn’t be fun in the rain, we chose to go to Munich instead.  I’ve already been to Munich before, but I think we decided to go there for the Hofbräuhaus because we were all hungry at the time (I hate it when my stomach does the talking).  Since Neuschwanstein and Munich are somewhat close (~ 130 km), it was easy to change to a different train to Munich.

This time, I had the chance to try the Bavarian Weisswurst (white sausage).  According to Wiki, it is a “traditional Bavarian sausage made from very finely minced veal and fresh pork bacon.”  It was served in a pot of hot water and a special sauce with a sweet flavour.  Even though it is a breakfast food, we managed to get it in the afternoon (I guess their supply hadn’t run out for the day yet). 

It looks kind of disgusting in the picture but it tasted so good.  I also ate this dish that had roasted suckling pig.  It tasted like Chinese 燒肉.  It even had the same crusty skin on the surface.

After we ate, we walked around Munich in the rain (that part sucked a lot because I had no umbrella) a bit to see some of the attractions.  I didn’t really take a lot of pictures of these because I saw them the first time around.

For some reason, we also went to look for poker chips.  Apparently my friends couldn’t find them in Stuttgart.  We walked around the toy section of the Galleria Kaufhof and actually found some.  At the same time, I saw also saw some cool toys (almost like being a kid again).

Afterward, we walked around the city some more and stumbled on a statue that got turned into a giant Michael Jackson tribute.

I still have no idea why that’s there, but I guess that’s for a good cause.  We then proceeded to the train station to go home.

On the way home, we passed the time by playing Poker using the newly purchased poker set.  We even played Asshole (a weird variant of Big 2).  But then, in our card playing, we failed to pay attention to the fact that our train had stopped and just idled in Treuchtlingen, which wasn’t the end stop.  Everyone else had already left the train.  We were sure that we boarded the right train, but I still have no idea why our train didn’t go to the stop that we needed (it was the end stop).  We think that the train may have split and we got stuck in the half that stayed behind.

When we realized this, I asked the one of the DB employees (in German ^_^) how to get to Stuttgart and he told me.  While we were stranded in Treuchtlingen, we killed time at a nearby park until our train came.  Luckily one of our friends brought a Frisbee so we threw that around for about an hour.  When we headed back to the station for our train, we found that the doors to the station were locked.  With one minute to go to find a way into the station and to the platform we needed, we sprinted to the next entrance and onto our train.  We made it with just a few seconds to go.  I would not have liked to stay a night here.

We were supposed to return to Stuttgart at around 7:30, but that delayed us and we ended up getting back at around 11:30.

More photos here