It has been such a long time since I’ve written on the blog that it took me a minute to remember what my password was for logging in. Crazy, but also interesting. 2018 has definitely been a year of doing and learning, but not a year of writing. It’s interesting the way life divides itself into these natural themes. Regardless, let’s get to the most important agenda item… Mike’s and my Germany trip! It is probably no secret to those who know us that 2018 was a very busy, somewhat stressful (in a good way!) year at work for both of us. Mike has been learning more about software engineering, took a class in data structures and algorithms (which he aced… unsurprisingly!), and officially transitioned to being an embedded software engineer in his org. I finally fully embraced being a manager of engineers instead of an engineer, and that has come with a huge set of challenges: working with different personality types, learning to influence without always having authority, taking the position that the buck stops with you, and that sometimes you have to deliver hard/unpopular messages that no one wants to hear.
Bottom line: this has been a great, but somewhat exhausting, year for both of us career-wise. Coupled with the fact that we haven’t had a vacation for more than 5 days since 2014 because of Piper the cat’s health, we were extremely ready to unplug for awhile. I chose the last two destinations for our big trips (Italy in 2013 and England/Ireland in 2014), so it was Mike’s turn to choose, and he chose Germany. Mike didn’t particularly want to plan out much of an itinerary. He didn’t want such a packed schedule that we came home from Germany needing another vacation. We wanted to see things and do things there, but also just be on a light schedule and not feel the stress of executing to a plan. Therefore (apart from plane tickets to Frankfurt) the only things I bought prior to the trip were our first two hotel nights in Munich and an all-in-one day tour to Neuschwanstein Castle for Monday (our first full day in Germany) from Munich. I figured things would look like:
- Fly to Frankfurt (the primary airport hub in Germany)
- Take a high speed train from Frankfurt to Munich
- Spend the first night in Munich
- See Neuschwanstein Castle all day the next day
- Have a great time for the rest of the trip
- Take a train from wherever to Frankfurt
- Fly back to Seattle
It wasn’t a bad plan, and it did not disappoint. 🙂
I hate flying on planes for anything more than about five hours since I start to get really restless and bored, so I worked out a lot in the week prior to flying out so that my poor tired muscles would be glad of a ten hour rest. Boxing Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, Crossfit with a friend on Thursday morning, power yoga Thursday night, boxing on Friday, and a run on Saturday morning. When Mike and I said goodbye to Piper Saturday morning to head to the airport I felt sufficiently ready to sit for the next 9.5 hours. 🙂
Piper is highly suspicious of packing!
Getting through security and to our gate was uneventful. I was slightly wary of flight delays because every flight I’ve taken in 2018 has been a mess, with the most recent trip to a convention in Houston resulting in my flight being cancelled, me getting rebooked on a flight two hours earlier that left me scrambling to get to the airport in time, and a re-route through Atlanta that was wildly out of the way. However, our flight boarded on time and departed on time.
Ready for a 9.5 hour flight!
The first leg of the journey was 9.5 hours between the SeaTac Airport and Charles DeGaulle Airport in France. I embraced my 9.5 hours of inactivity by reading for an hour before watching two movies consecutively: Collatoral with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx (which was great and took place entirely at night… perfect for flying through the night to Paris) and Creed (which I had seen before, but apparently I can watch boxing endlessly without getting bored). Mike watched Collatoral as well and a Ferrari documentary which I had seen on a previous plane trip. It is interesting but definitely not a happy story since most of the early great race car drivers died in explosive car crashes. I was hoping to get a little sleep on the plane, but it turned out that I was not tired in the slightest since the plane departed at 11am Seattle time. We were slated to arrive in Frankfurt, Germany around 6:30am the following day so in theory we should have been getting sleep to prepare for a full day in Germany, but it just didn’t happen. We disembarked 9.5 hours later in Charles DeGaulle Airport pretty exhausted. Although we were getting off of a reasonably big 767, our next flight from Paris to Frankfurt was on a little puddle jumper, and we had to take a tram to a separate part of the airport for that. We discovered that the part of the airport that the little, local planes flew out of was extremely uninteresting and basically consisted of one giant waiting room for all of the gates. Not much of a Paris experience! It felt like we were in some little holding area no-man’s-land. However, we were tired enough that we took quick naps before our flight to Frankfurt took off. Our flight to Frankfurt was crazily turbulent. Maybe that was just because we were sitting near the back of a puddle jumper, but there was a lot of crazy up-and-down and side-to-side motion. The interesting part is that we were already starting to hear a lot of German; our English was going to be in the minority in the near future! The kids sitting across from us spent most of the flight singing, so between the turbulence and their singing, sleep was not happening. The songs the kids sang were interesting as well; they seemed fairly dark and were a mix of English and German. An hour and a half later, we were in Frankfurt around 6:30am. Our first night’s hotel was booked in Munich, so we had a train ride ahead of us. I was starting to regret planning on a train trip after a 14 hour flight + layover, but fortunately Frankfurt was a power transportation hub so we didn’t even need to leave the airport to catch a train. Planes, trains, subways, buses, etc, all departed from the same station. We bought train tickets for Frankfurt and bought ourselves a train station lunch in the meantime. We were pretty sick of traveling by that point, but 3.5 hours in a train to Munich was the last leg of the journey. Unfortunately about an hour from Munich, there were train problems (I think they were related to a strike among the train workers, but we weren’t sure because all of the announcements on the train intercom system were in German), so our train stopped for a full hour on the tracks and our 3.5 hour trip ended up being a 4.5 hour trip. We arrived in Munich around 6pm completely exhausted, very tired of traveling, and ready to be done! Fortunately the hotel I booked was right across the street from the train station, so we pretty much rolled our bags off the train, across the street, and into the hotel. Note to self: travels that last more than 12 hours are taxing!
We exited the train station to find the weather windy and cold, probably to be expected in Bavaria, Germany in December! We were near the German side of the Alps, after all! We had no ambitious plans that first night except to recover from what felt like an eternity of travel. I looked up some good Munich restaurants online, and we ventured out for dinner to a restaurant called Sophia’s.
The cocktails there were excellent, and the food was very good! They also gave us an appetizer platter of fresh bread, olive tapenade, roasted garlic, and chestnuts. Mike and I devoured it! It was nice to actually be on vacation instead of traveling to get to our vacation.
We went to bed relatively early, with the thought that we would get a good night’s sleep and head to our day-trip tour of Neuschwanstein Castle which started at 8:45am.
Of course, our jet lag kicked in, and not only did we have no problem waking up in time for our 8:45am castle tour, we woke up at 5:30am starving. One of the best parts of traveling (in Mike’s and my humble opinions) is the international breakfasts at the hotels. That is why I always prioritize booking at hotels with reputable breakfasts. Particularly with jetlag, Mike and I are often not very hungry later in the afternoon, so breakfast is key to get us up and going and out to see the city on the correct foot. Breakfast didn’t start until 6:15am, so we got up and dressed and showered and determined what subway we needed to take to the pick-up point for the tour.
The breakfast did not disappoint!! This was one of three tables of buffet breakfast food!
I helped myself to hard-boiled eggs, baked beans, and fruit, while Mike with more of a classic scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast breakfast. Regardless it was delicious and we felt very refreshed and ready to go afterwards. Our hotel was right across the street from München Hauptbahnhof or Munich HBF (the main Munich train station), so we were easily able to catch the subway from there to anywhere we wanted to go in Munich. We were meeting the tour group near the Hofbräuhaus (more on that in a later post if you aren’t familiar with it). We were at the pickup point early and used the extra time to take pictures.
Gorgeous architecture!
People started to arrive for the bus tour. Mike and I had come prepared with our own bottled water and snacks since we knew it was a full day tour, but most people hadn’t, so the tour guide directed them all to a nearby grocery store. Mike and I just waited around for 10 minutes or so while everyone else went snack-shopping. Standing around waiting is one of the problems with being over-prepared (i.e. the story of our lives)!
Our tour guide was very engaging and was from Baltimore and had moved to Munich about a decade earlier. He had a lot of great info about the sights we would be seeing! Our tour had three stops: the first was the small village of Oberammergau (I think this was mostly an opportunistic stop, because we passed through it on the way to Neuchwanstein anyway), Linderhof Palace (another castle built by the same “mad king” Ludwig II who built Neuschwanstein, and Neuschwanstein itself.
Oberammergau was a cool little village known for its wood-working. They had so many shops full of crafts for purchase!
ALL the wooden nutcrackers for sale!
While we were there, it started to snow… the first snow of the season in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps!
After Oberammergau, we got back on the tour bus, and headed for Linderhof Palace, our next destination. “Mad” King Ludwig II who designed both Linderhof Palace and Neuschwanstein Castle was enamoured of French architecture and Louis XIV. Linderhof Palace wasn’t huge (by castle standards), but it was extremely opulent. Almost unbelievably so. It was dedicated to the Palace of Versailles, and it was clear that Ludwig was trying to get his own little Versailles in the Bavarian Alps.
Linderhof Palace
Clearly opulence was the order of the day!
Pictures weren’t allowed inside Linderhof, which was a pity because every nook was crazily picture-worthy! For example, the intricately carved woodwork above Ludwig’s bed took wood carvers three years to make! Three years for something that was not functional and only served to increase the general ornate-ness! For an idea of how incredibly opulent and gold-covered everything was, here are some pictures of the inside: https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/interior-of-linderhof-palace. Although the castle was very impressive, Ludwig built it as a refuge for himself and didn’t entertain there often. A highlight of Linderhof Palace was the Venus Grotto (an indoor man-made stalactite cave room complete with a lake and a swan boat to take out on the lake) which was lit with brightly colored lights and powered by the world’s first power plant. Another highlight was Ludwig’s dining room which had a mechanical apparatus for lowering the dining table down through the floor, closing the floor above it, and then raising the table back up again. The goal was for the table to be lowered down, set with dishes and food, and then raised up again for dinner.
After Linderhof Palace, we all got back on the bus and headed towards Neuschwanstein Castle. It was as snowy and dark as you would expect of the Bavarian Black Forest in the foothills of the Alps.
An hour later, we arrived at the lower area of Neuschwanstsein. We still had a half hour walk ahead of us to get up to the castle itself. Apparently there are buses that take people up to the castle during nice weather, but since we had arrived on the first day of snowfall, the buses weren’t running. We had no problem making the half hour hike up since the road was nice and fully paved, but Mike was disappointed that the bridge in front of the castle (from which he had wanted to take a picture of the castle) was closed because of the weather.
Walking up to Neuschwanstein
The weather started to clear as we climbed
Neuschwanstein!
Neuschwanstein was massive and impressive.
Interestingly, Neuschwanstein Castle is unfinished on the inside, because Ludwig II died (under highly suspicious circumstances, along with the doctor who officially declared him insane) before it was finished. The tour guide was full of interesting information on the history of the royal family in Bavaria (of which Ludwig II was part). Interestingly, Bavaria is the wealthiest of the German states, and had a King separate from the general German rulership for centuries. Even today, Bavaria legally reserves the right to secede from Germany and become their own independent nation. Very interesting!
Anyway, Ludwig II, the so-called “mad king” who built Neuschwanstein sounded crazy based on the small amount of research I had done prior to the trip, but quite frankly in light of the information from the tour guide on his family and on other royals in general at the time, I started to feel as though Ludwig wasn’t so crazy. He had a brother who was also declared mentally insane, but his brother enjoyed stabbing people (a pretty disturbing past time!), whereas Ludwig’s “craziness” just manifested itself in a desire to recreate the old glory of kingliness a la Louis XIV. Clearly, from Linderhof Palace, it was clear that King Ludwig had eyes for grandeur, but he seemed only debatably crazy. We saw his family’s home in Munich on a later day, and it was just as opulent and indescribably over-the-top. Anyway, Mike and I left Linderhof Palace with the feeling that Ludwig II wasn’t any more or less crazy than the rest of his family and his worst fault seemed to be having no concept of the price of things and squandering much of his family’s fortune on three unnecessary castles.
The interior of Neuschwanstein was still highly impressive, although not as opulent as Linderhof Castle, and once again, no pictures were allowed inside.
The outer Neuschwanstein courtyard
The view into the villages below from the castle was breath-taking.
A gorgeous view, but the castle was a little too close to the edge of a mountain cliff for my comfort level!
Between residual jetlag and being outside in the cold a good portion of the day, we were exhausted when we hiked back down the path from Neuschwanstein to the parking lot and got on our bus. Even though it was only 5pm it was already pretty dark. Mike and I ate some Rittersport chocolate we had brought with us (which tasted intensely good!!) and then dozed on and off during the two hour drive back to Munich. We had a late dinner at our hotel which was highly satisfying and very Bavarian (i.e. meat, potatoes, and other root vegetables). We basically fell into bed that night and had no definite plans for the following day besides hitting up at least one Christmas market.
Time to stop for now… more episodes to follow! 🙂
rainydayrunner 