August 3rd, the Romantic Road

Awesome wonderful day today, as we drove along the Romantic Road in Bavaria, seeing the picturesque alpine villages with white washed or pastel houses covered in artistic drawings, fairytale castles, and fantastic mountains. Basically every cliche term you would want to use and every one would apply perfectly. 

It looks like every owner of every village here is waiting for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be featured on the postcard. And so they fix their window curtains just so, touch up the paint outside so it looks like it was freshly painted, and make sure that only identical firewood logs are allowed to grace perfectly ordered “piles” outside. 

After the nondescript breakfast at a crowded eating space we rushed out of the noisy dusty Munich at 7am and 15 minutes later arrived to our destination. 

Just kidding! Dan typed in the name of the street but not the name of town. So we ended up pretty much where we started. 

New start and in about 2 hours we arrived to Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles (I think I can win a Spelling Bee with that).

Built for the similar reason as Sintra, these were designed to be “Romantic” and picture-worthythe outside. We had a tour of the second one. I marveled at the tasteless decor and yak-inspiring wall murals that looked like the illustrations of the children’s book and covered all three stories. True, Max II and his eccentric son Ludvig II were not the richest of kings but take some inspiration from the other royals they did not. Kids liked clear simple explanations though. But adults could not take a second portion of Romantic kitch and did a marathon run to the other castle on another hill, took pictures, and skipped out on our tour there.

During our morning ride we realized that the awesome mountain that Verochka was raving about was only a short ride away at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We drove there and accidentally shot over to Austria on the way as cheerfully alerted by our cell phones. Regardless we drove to the closest cable car station and in minutes we were airborne, stopping the ascent at 2600m. 

The views were awesome. A part of the mountain was clouded over but other surely offered views into Austria, Germany, Italy, and Schwitcherland. We could not tell for sure about the other two. We walked over to the German side of the mountain and took another cable car down to glacier. There kids and adults had fun sliding down to the glacier on the sleds. Did I say awesome? :) 

We were wearing our summer clothes, and Polinka and Isabella sandals but we were comfortable after the scorching heat of the last few days. It was impressive to see the real climbers who scaled the mountain on their feet and were wearing specialized gear. We got a few beers to further add to the experience.

The next step was Mittenwald 20km away. Loved it, loved it, loved it. Impossible cuteness. What I said before about the picture perfect - applied to every house in town. Our dinner at the local biergarten was also nothing to complain about. Relaxed crowd that included some scenic looking Bavarian grandpas clad in lederhosen and Tyrollean hats added to the feel of the place. Kids got an added bonus because the place had the trampoline. 

Dan is trying to convince me to get a Bavarian woman outfit. These don’t require too much convincing but I’ll be down if Dan is for the matching man outfit :) 

We’ve made a few more stops at a scenic spots on the way to Bad Tolz, our final stop on a way to Munich. Bad, as the name should have suggested - OK to skip. Kidding about Bad - it means Bath. The place started to flourish when they discovered iodide springs there. But when we got into the town it looked provincial and well on its way toward decline. So we kept going as the dusk set on.