Wed. driving in the rain

Had a wonderful breakfast at the hotel. Everyone here is so nice. During breakfast, the music that was playing was the Beatles...ha! That reminds me, when I was over in Europe in 1972, and traveling with Jeanette, we hitched a ride in Germany with a guy. When we got into his car he asked us where we were from (nothing unusual). We told him we were from America and so he reached down and pulled up a small crate full of cassette tapes, looked them over, and then popped one in. The music that began to play was a twangy "She'll be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes". I guess he was trying to make us feel at home! Jeanette and I couldn't even look at each other or we would have totally lost it!

Here's Leo helping himself at breakfast:


Also at breakfast this morning, we had the absolute best blue cheese we have ever had. And Marilyn, this is for you...as one of the 6 choices of jam, they had rumtopf! I remember when you got Mom started on that...fermenting the fruit...that was so good!

We took off to go down the road and it basically rained the entire day, so I don't have many pictures to show. It actually was very pretty...everything was so green.


And Sara, this one's for you:



At one point, Gwendolyn announced that we were back in Germany. We followed the alpiner strasse around zig zag turns. Along the way we saw a lot of dairy cattle. A lot of the time the cows were really up high on a mountainside. This picture shows some...



but the picture doesn't really show how steep it was. Anyway, Leo's comment was that if one of those cows ever started to roll down the hill, there would be no stopping them because of the steepness...and then he said that there would be a hamburger and milkshake (the cows were dairy) at the bottom of the hill.

We stopped off at a little store along the way and even though it was before noon, I was trying some schnapps! Dang! That stuff is strong! (No, Leo didn't try any...he was driving). We also stopped at a kase haus...a cheese shop where they had unbelievable cheese. I got 3 small chunks of cheese: one called blumenkase...it had dried crushed flowers on the rind!...so pretty!, another was with chives....wunderbar!, and another with crushed cumin on the rind. We call them "Holy crap!" cheese...because everytime we take a bite, that's what we say! And the good part is that we don't need to refrigerate the cheese...it's so much better that way.

More rain..



We got as far as Schwangau...close to Fussen. We're staying in a pension...here's a picture of the key to our room:



Leo calls it Kaiser Wilhelm's skate key!

Hopefully it won't be raining tomorrow so I can take a better picture out our bedroom window...it's amazing. The man at the pension said we could have a room for 76 E. ($99), but for 4 E. more ($5) we could have a room with a view of the castle. I had seen a castle on the side of the mountain here (actually 2), but I had no idea what it was (that's because they were doing some upkeep work and had scaffolding over most of the castle). Anyway, here's the view out our bedroom window:



You can barely see the castle...so here's a closer look:



Is this starting to look familiar?
One more:



Holy crap! It's the most famous castle in all of Germany: Neuschwanstein!!! It's the castle that they modeled Disneyland after! It's just that it doesn't look so nice with all the mess around it! But this is out our bedroom window...amazing!

This castle was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the late 1800's. King Ludwig is also known as the crazy king...he sort of went crackers.

We had a nice dinner at a local restaurant here and came back and just relaxed. Tomorrow morning we're going to Crystal Therme...a mineral spring spa. I'll be able to tell you more tomorrow.


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Location:Austria and Germany