Day 39: By lunchtime we'll be in Venice

A commute day today.  Boring.  Well not too boring.  I mean I could be sitting at home, or working…
Germany is a very scenic country to drive through.  From Salzburg, the countryside slowly changed from the mountains, to verdant green countryside.
Within not much more than 2 hours we’d dropped off the car and were at the airport.  Very early.  I prefer to be early at airports, but this was very early. And airports aren’t the cheapest of places to eat either.  Anyway, they had my favourite weisswurst so I took advantage of my last chance to have this, and also grabbed a nice huge weissbeer, even though it was about 9 in the morning.  I wasn’t the only one either.

Day 36: We're going to Salzburg!

Not a great deal to really to say of interest today, given it was a commute day.  Well at least for the morning.  We farewelled our lovely host in Garmisch, then spent an uneventful though beuatiful two hours or so driving to Salzburg.  The highlight of the trip was stopping at a roadside stop for breakfast, and they had weisswurst!

Day 35: More Ludwig, More Schloss, More Wagner

Now today we put into practice our well learnt lesson from yesterday; we were at Linderhof Castle not long after opening, joining the very next tour at 9:30. Yay!
Now this castle was a lot smaller, and set in large, extensive grounds and gardens, and so was very different to the Neuschwanstein Castle we'd visited the day before.
Ludwig had Linderhof built to replicate and celebrate the French baroque period and as a tribute to Sun King Louis XIV, who Ludwig totally idolised.

Day 34: It's pronounced Neuschwanstein

Today’s plan of up early didn’t quite eventuate, but at least it was still morning when we left the house.  Neuschwanstein Castle was on the agenda for today.  I figured it would be an easy day, just one castle, not too hard….
After a quick detour into Grainau for a fruitless search for Weisswurtz we had a gute fahrt through the Bavarian countryside, passing more ruined castles atop hill tops.

Day 33: Die Zugspitze

It was absolutely the best weather today, so today would be superb for Zugspitzing.
So we were up nice and early to get the 8:30 train, but still we just missed it.  Probably didn’t help going to the wrong station, but hey.  We grabbed a coffee and caught the next train up through the beautiful scenery of green grass fields, villages of painted houses and kids riding their bikes to school through the town streets and bike paths all framed with a beautiful snow covered mountain backdrop.

Everybody wants a photo of the blue train

Day 32: Lake Como to Garmisch. Five countries in one day

I had planned to head to Garmish via St Moritz, but without any internet, and relying on my phone to look up the road conditions pages which were all in German, I couldn’t confirm 100% that all the roads would be open.  So we had to take the boring safe route and go back out the way we came in, and up the freeways. That meant those narrow roads from Hades back along Lake Como.
To makes things worse, Sygic carked it that morning, and there was no way I was able to get it going again.  So we had to resort to the old fashioned way: paper maps and road signs.  Now this can be a bit tricky when your paper map covers the entire continental Europe, and road signs aren’t in English and don’t always clearly depict the direction you need to go. Getting back to Como was simple enough, if extremely hairy.  But in Como, the signs for the A9 said Milano (southbound), and didn’t say Lugano (northbound).  So rather than risk it I decided to keep going on rather than just heading to the A9 and seeing where we ended up.  This meant we went all around the outskirts of Como.  I decided in the end to just head to the A9.  Worse case was at least we’d be on it, and if heading the wrong direction would just have to turn around when we were able to.  As it turned out, this was the correct course and we were thankfully on the motorway heading north.  The views from up high over the lakes are just spectacular, even today when the weather was overcast and hazy. As the paper maps were proving a little dubious, I turned to back up navigation, Google Maps.  This worked well enough for the most part, even though it chewed through $30 worth of overseas mobile data.  Still that would have been what some decent maps cost would have cost.