Castles and More Castle

December 30, 2010 - 9:47 pm (2:47 pm CT)
Munich
What a long day! We started out by going on an 11 hour tour of Royal Castles of Neuschwanstein and Linderhof. So we were up early this morning and got on a packed bus with the most scatter brained guide. Apparently there were more people wanting to go on this tour today than usually. They normally have 2 busses but today that had at least 5 that we know about. It was so crazy the amount of people fighting to get on buses for the tour. Unfortunately we ended up on the worse bus. For some reason they decided that our bus should do the tour backwards. So we went to the Neuschwanstein Castle first. Well that caused our tour guide to go into frazzled mode as she didn't know what to do about lunch and the other stops along the way. We had the stuck up Chicagoans next to us. And a group from Singapore. I thought Japanese tourist were bad, well this group from Singapore are whole other level. Our guide told us to be back at the bus immediately after our tour. The group from Singapore demanded an exact time to meet back at the bus and they ended up being the last people on the bus....15 minutes late. How frustrating! They wanted a time and then didn't even make it back in time. The hike up to the castle was a work out. It is 1 mile straight up on a snow packed walk. You could ride a horse drawn carriage but the line for that was ridiculous long and we had plenty of time to walk up. The weather didn't cooperate at all. It was so foggy we could barely see the castle!!! My pictures show what we were dealing with. Thankfully after our tour on the way down the clouds lifted long enough for me to get some pictures. So the tour was fine. There are 4 floors but not many rooms are finished as Mad King Ludwig died before it was done. They are such Nazis about photos...not allowed. I snapped a few of the last room when everybody had left. I've gotten quite good at taking secret pictures. After that we went to another castle, Linderhof, which was tiny but still very interesting. It was so cold waiting for the castle tour. Finally we stopped at the tiny town of Oberrammergau for some shopping. Very cool town...google it! Beautiful Cuckoo clocks and a Christmas store. We made our way back to Munich by around 7:30. We went to Hofbrauhaus for some oom-pah music and beer. Very historic beer hall, just like I remembered. We grabbed some lunch and are now chilling in the room. Tomorrow we will actually do some tour around the center of Munich. Because the castles are closed tomorrow we had no choice but to do that tour today (along with the rest of the world).