Europe Trip: Bavaria

How wonderful it was to wake up to this view in the morning after our wonderful 24 hours in Munich:

This was our hotel, where the tipsy lady at the front desk finally got our paperwork figured out:


She also gave us the hotel card and said if we went into Fussen and went to the right, we could get big discounts. No discounts on the left, but on the right, BIG discount.

Every house in Bavaria seems required to look like this or cuter:


We headed down on foot to our little man-made lake in Hopfam-am-See or something like that. It must mean "Boring Tourist Trap" in German, but it was still pretty.


Our first objective was to figure out how to get out of Hopfam for the day. We went to the Tourist Information place and asked about renting bikes for the day. The German man behind the counter became very stern upon finding out that we had only one day to spend in the area. "Why would you waste your time on a bike? You cannot rent a bike and see Bavaria in one day! This is impossible." He would only tell us how to rent bikes when I promised him we would come back for a week with a car. I guess that's the German way of promoting tourism. The nearest place to rent bikes was in Fussen, so we figured out the bus schedule and had to kill an hour waiting in Hopfam, so we made fun of the tourists. Sorry if your grandma was there and we made fun of her.
We passed a gentleman with his sleeves tucked conveniently away so they didn't swing in the breeze

Hard-core walkers on the flat, paved path in town with their expensive outdoor gear and walking sticks. They're even walking single file to draft or cut through the wind like Olympians do.

Really funny looking lady behind me

We found the bike rental place and almost got the bikes, but I requested that we check email first. When we came back, the bike rental place was closed for the German version of siesta (the guys drinking beer on the benches outside informed us) and we had Munich flashbacks. Thankfully, we found another shop which ended up being 4 euros cheaper. So there.

We set off on the bikes in the beautiful sunshine, and thanks to my husband's navigating skills and the well-kept German roads and trails, we rode to the area's famous castles...Neuschwanstein and that other one. We opted not to go inside because we had already seen such cool castles in the UK...castles that were made for war, not on the whim of a Mad King.

If you click on the picture, you can see the castle behind us.

We continued riding through beautiful, fall-colored tree tunnels. It seemed that the scenery was more breathtaking around each corner. I just stopped taking pictures after a while, and even now, I look at the pictures and don't feel like they do justice for how it looked and felt to be there on that autumn day.

We rode up a steep-but-not-too-steep pass and ended up in Austria. It was then that I imagined the Von Trapps sneaking around and began singing songs from the Sound of Music.

The closest I think I will ever come to seeing Jeremy in lederhosen.

Austria

The rest of the afternoon was golden...full of the exhiliration of exercise and speed as we went up and down hills, the smells of wet paths and crisp green fields, the sounds of cows grazing with cowbells attached to their collars, and the sight of country houses with white washed walls, painted murals, dark timbers and flowers spilling out of the window boxes. Here is a picture tour:

Castle in the distance

We did some shopping (okay, I did some shopping...I don't know what Jeremy did) and carefully chose our dinner location, but not after first putting Jeremy in the stocks.

We wanted an authentic Bavarian dinner experience, so it wasn't complete without this:

and a hot dog disguised as a steak with a fried egg on top. Even though the food was less stellar than we had hoped (and we didn't get pretzels), the atmosphere was right...the cook came out to smoke with his cronies and the waitress who was a little past her prime wore a low cut dirndl, the butcher came over to chat, and the dish ran away with the spoon. Okay, I got carried away.

Because the over-priced buses stopped running back to Hopfam at 6 pm, and we had been evaluating how well we had packed for 2.5 weeks in carry-on suitcases, we decided to stay in Fussen as late as we wanted and then ride our bikes back to our hotel...then our plan was to use our clotheslines (that we hadn't used up to that point) to tie our suitcases to the bikes in order to ride back to the train station in Fussen early the next morning. Jeremy spent most of the evening gnawing through the clotheslines (for lack of scissors, despite dangerously snooping around the front desk looking for some) and attaching our suitcases to the bikes inside our nice and neat German hotel room. I watched Edward Scissorhands in German...oh! I just now got the irony!

In the morning, we smuggled some pretzels out of the dining room and headed off into the fog to ride to the train station...being careful to avoid cow patties on the bike path the whole way there.



Last Stop: The Prague

(Here's a short video of "The Bavarian Cows and How Jeremy Ruined the Moment")