Both: Hey everyone!
Jen: It's Jen and Greg with an update on our travels.
Greg: This update is part two from our time in Munich. We are going to cover Neuschwanstein Castle and then wrap up with the Glockenspiel.
The update may be a little longer than we normally do because we really want to cover the amazing true story of Neuschwanstein Castle. And we utilized ChatGPT to craft an almost fairytale version of it to share with you.
Jen: Yes…
So, in a land far, far away, the Neuschwanstein Castle rises above the Bavarian countryside like something pulled from a dream. Turrets, spires, and cliffside walls that look almost too theatrical to be real. The name means “New Swan Stone”, a reference to the swan knights of medieval legend and to Ludwig II's personal symbol, the swan, drawn from Wagner's operas and old Germanic myths. He didn't choose the site at random. The castle overlooks Ludwig's childhood home, Hohenschwangau, and was meant to be both a monument to the past and an escape from the world he was supposed to rule.
Greg: But…Neuschwanstein was never finished. Construction started in 1869, and while the blueprint called for more than 200 rooms, fewer than 15 were completed. The castle was not built for court life or military defense. It was a fantasy retreat, Ludwig's private stage. He lived there for just 172 days before his dramatic fall from power and mysterious death in 1886.
Jen: Ludwig financed the castle almost entirely out of his own pocket, refusing to use the state funds. But he didn't have the money. By the end, he spent over 6 million marks on Neuschwanstein alone, more than triple the original budget. And he racked up 14 million marks in total personal debt. That number doesn't mean much to us today without context. So to give you an idea, one gold mark was worth 0.358 grams of gold. And at today's price, Ludwig's debt equals roughly 275 million euro or just under 300 million U.S. dollars.
Greg: His other projects, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, were just as excessive. He built entire mirrored halls, artificial lakes, underground grottoes, all for himself. All while his creditors grew restless. Eventually, his ministers acted. In June 1886, they declared him insane based on second-hand reports, arrested him, and installed a regency. Three short days later, he was found dead in waist-deep water in Lake Starnberg, alongside the psychiatrist who’d had certified him mentally unfit. No one knows exactly what happened. Did he die by his own hand? Was it an accident? Was he assassinated? It is still all debated today.
Jen: But what's left is the castle. Empty, unfinished, and completely divorced from its original purpose. But somehow, more famous than anything Ludwig ever ruled. Today, it draws millions each year. And Disney modeled Cinderella's castle after it.
The irony? The fantasy Ludwig bankrupted himself to build is now one of Germany's most profitable landmarks.
Greg: The end.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: No, seriously. We just really, really thought it's such a fantastical story and absolutely true that we wanted to convey it in a way that sets the theme because when you go visit Neuschwanstein Castle, there is an obvious feeling of fantasy when you're there, or at least it was for us.
Jen: Right, for sure.
So our tour started in Munich, and it was an all-day bus tour of about 50 or so people. It was a two-hour drive through the Bavarian countryside. We even got to go on the Autobahn.
Greg: Yes, but there's a governor on the bus which keeps it below a certain speed.
Jen: Yeah, but we can still say we went on the Autobahn. We don't have to tell anybody how fast we drove.
Greg: Right? (laughs)
Jen: (laughs)
So it was really kind of funny because our guides were Australian and Spanish, giving us a tour of a German castle, but we went with it.
And the guide from Spain, when she saw our last name, got super excited, spoke Spanish. She rattled off this phrase really quickly that I'm pretty sure she told us she could translate the tour into Spanish if we wanted her to.
And Greg and I both looked at her and just went, “we don’t, we don't speak Spanish.”
Greg: Yeah. She got a little sad ‘cause it was her native language. So when she had the opportunity to speak Spanish for the tour, she was really hoping that that would be the case.
Jen: Yep.
Greg: Unfortunately, I am not true to my heritage.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: So the bus drops you off at Hohenschwangau, the town. It's a little, small village that's kind of at the base of both castles because there is a Schloss Hohenschwangau, which was the childhood castle of Ludwig II.
And I think an interesting fun fact — and we know everybody loves these fun facts — Hohenschwangau means “Upper Swan Region”. So when they were looking for a place to build a castle, they found a lake. And it was just dozens and dozens of swans, and it was beautiful to them, and there was the German Alps, and they said, “this is the spot”. So that's where they built that first castle, Castle Hohenschwangau, and it really is a very visually appealing area for sure.
Jen: Yeah, I agree.
So you can see the castle as you drive up, and it's just towering there out of the trees on the side of a mountain. It's really awesome. But when you walk through the town, it's also cool to see from the ground. And that day, there just happened to be a bunch of power parachuters flying around the castle. So the sky was super blue, the white stone walls of the castle stood out against the green trees, and the bright colors of the parachute just really made for a… unbelievable experience.
Greg: Yeah, I know people like to overuse the word “surreal”. But in a way, that's how it felt. This fantasy come to life. We were really there in it! It could not have been more perfect. We tried to get pictures to show because, I mean, you just had to be there to really understand it. The pictures just don't do it justice.
Jen: Right. It was a perfect day.
So to reach the castle from the town, you can hike up a very steep incline that could probably take you 40 minutes to an hour. Or you can take a three euro shuttle bus. And nobody from our tour chose the walking option.
Greg: And when the guide saw that no one chose the hike option, he literally said, “Good, I did my job well.”
Jen: (laughs) Yeah.
So the bus drops you off where the line for the MarienBrücke starts, which is the bridge that goes across the big gorge.
Greg: Yeah, we'll describe more about that afterwards, ‘cause when we first got there, the line was a little bit long. And they said, look, if we let you guys wait in this line to go across the bridge — which everyone wanted to do — we'll miss our time for the guided tour.
But from there, we then went on a steep decline towards the castle.
Jen: Along the way, we stopped at a lookout point that had a stunning view of Schloss Hohenschwangau along the lake.
Greg: Yeah, and I really liked how the stone from Schloss Hohenschwangau is kind of yellow, maybe, like, copperish, and the contrast with the lake and the green trees and the forest, and the lake was very, very calm, and it was really this fantastic view.
Jen: Yeah, I think we keep describing this view as “amazing” and “fantastic”, and it really was!
Greg: I think the word “fantastic” is so perfect because it was like fantasy come to life.
Jen: Yeah.
So from there, we continued to the castle itself and waited for our tour to begin. All the tours are led by official castle staff. They don't let any outside tour guides in. It keeps the experience consistent, but it's also a little rigid.
Greg: They do it for control. There's no pictures allowed. They don't even want you to pull your phone out while you're on the tour. So you really do appreciate the things when you're in there, but you don't have a way to document it. So we don't have pictures from inside.
Jen: Yeah, but if you look up the castle itself, there are some, like, artist renderings of the inside of the castle that are really pretty cool.
Greg: Yeah. One of the more unexpected areas of the castle was an artificially made cave that's just tucked between two rooms and you walk right through it.
Jen: Yeah, it was really dark and cold, just like a regular cave.
Greg: Complete with stalactites and stalagmites, gave you this feel that you walked through a cave.
Another room that was just as over the top is the throne room, which is massive, two-story vaulted ceiling, gold everywhere, but no actual throne.
Jen: Yeah, I think they said one was planned, but never completed.
There was also a small theater area that he created inside of the castle, complete with a stage, and the intended purpose for this was going to be private performances of Wagner's operas, one of his favorites. But in the end, there were no performances ever held there.
Greg: Right. Which is kind of sad —
Jen: Yeah…
Greg: — because that stage and that little room for the theater really did give you this great feel of the Valkyries and all these operatic things.
Jen: Another thing that we really enjoyed was this long hallway that was just one wall full of large windows that overlooked the mountains and the forest below. And then the opposite wall was, like, covered in this very bold pattern of purples and blues and greens. And it had long gold lines that created these diamond patterns that kind of reminded us of a jester's costume.
Greg: There were also so many windows besides that hallway that gave you fantastic views throughout the castle. I, we keep saying fantastic. You had to be there.
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: Other than that, the tour did involve a lot of stairs, multiple flights. Also, there's no opportunity to sit or rest along the way. And when you consider the decline down, you have to be careful because you really could trip and, and fall. Also, you have to walk that incline coming back out. It is not something that we recommend if you struggle with physical activity.
Jen: Right. I would definitely make sure all the members of your party can manage stairs and manage a lot of walking.
Greg: Yeah.
When we got out of the tour of the castle, everybody else is out there, starts walking back up the incline. Jennifer and I did the same thing, and I told her, “You see all of these people around us? This is the competition. We're all going to the same place.” So we HOOFED it!
Jen: It became a race.
A funny story about this hike back up this incline…
We passed a dad who probably wasn't much older than us, looking back at it now. But he was literally dragging his two teenage kids up the walk. They were grabbed onto his arms. He looked like a poor horse dragging a plow trying to get these kids up the hill.
Greg: Yes. And I couldn't help but laugh. This poor guy, you could see in a way he was beat down, but also he was determined to prove that he could do it.
Jen: Yeah. And it looked like that probably was not the first time that this had happened on his trip. (laughs)
Greg: True, true.
Eventually, we got up to the spot for Marienbrücke and the line was not that bad.
Jen: Yeah, so the bridge is called Marienbrücke, which translates to “Mary's Bridge”. And the Mary is Mary, Queen of Prussia, who is Ludwig II's mom. And her sweet son Ludwig gave her a very thoughtful gift of a very large bridge that spans two cliff sides that gave her the best view. She loved to hike, she loved the German Alps. And he wanted to give her something where she could experience the view like no one else could.
Greg: Yeah. And at the time, the bridge was a marvel of engineering because it goes over a very famous, uh, gorge in that area that loosely translates to “thundering gorge” or “roaring gorge”. It's like a thousand foot drop. There's a waterfall. It does make you a little nervous (laughs) when you're standing over it.
Jen: And I can tell you right now that my heart's racing a little bit just thinking about standing on that bridge. While this bridge might have been a marvel of engineering in its time, I doubted that it was still that same marvel.
Greg: Well, for everyone who is wondering, the bridge has been revisited. It is structurally sound. There's actually steel running underneath all of those wooden boards.
Jen: Yeah, I get that. The logical part of my brain said the bridge was safe. But every time one of those little boards shifted under my feet, my logic did not win out.
Greg: You went further along than a lot of people because part of the issue that we encountered is while the line was not long and we did get onto the bridge within just a few minutes, so many people just gather right at the beginning of the bridge. Some because they wanted to stay in the shade of that area, but most of them were too nervous to go further out on that bridge.
Jen: Yeah, I think there were a couple of relationships that might have ended on that bridge. (laughs)
Greg: No, I did hear one girl chew out her boyfriend while he was trying to drag her further out there.
Jen: She was, like, “You just take the picture for me!” (laughs)
Greg: Yeah. But we did go further out, a little past the halfway point. We were completely by ourselves at that point. Got terrific pictures of the castle. Jennifer even took one of the gorge.
Jen: I did. And I sent it to a couple people and they were like, “NOPE!” (laughs)
Greg: Yeah. So once we got our pictures and we kind of experienced that view, uh, we went ahead back to the shuttle bus, which took us back to the town. We hung out a little bit, got on the tour bus, drove us back to Munich. That was the end of that day. And I cannot imagine the day being a better one than what we experienced.
Jen: Yeah, I agree. The weather was great, the scenery was amazing.
Greg: For a castle that is the ultimate inspiration for fairy tales and fantasy. We experienced real life fantasy at this castle!
Jen: Yeah, it was awesome! (laughs)
Greg: Yeah.
So the last piece we're going to talk about is the Rathaus Glockenspiel, which was just a few minutes from our hotel. We took some time one day to go see one of the performances.
Jen: Yeah, our little baseball cards that we talked about last time kind of led us to this glockenspiel. It's on the top of the town hall in MarienPlatz, and it's supposed to start at noon. However…it did not.
Greg: Because when noon hit, there were several bell towers, like, there were some churches nearby and some other things that immediately start chiming out at noon and they take a few minutes to complete. And the glockenspiel does nothing this whole time.
So it was like 12:06 and everybody out there is standing around, like, “Did we miss a performance? What happened?”
Jen: So at first, it was just music, no movement for five solid minutes. And then it got quiet for about a minute. And everybody in the crowd started looking at one another, like, “Is it broken? Did , did we miss something?”
And then it started up again with the music and movement and everything.
Greg: Yeah, and this is what people come to see. There's the animated figures acting out scenes from Munich's past. There's also dancing couples. And the real centerpiece of it is the jousting match in which knights pass each other, like, two or three times. And then the last time one knight knocks another one off of the horse.
Jen: Yeah, everybody kind of clapped when that happened. (laughs)
Greg: Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, there's so many gaps between the things happening where it's just silence for, like, a minute that everybody finds themselves not sure. Is it done? Is there more? So even when it was done, nobody knew if it was done!
Jen: Yeah, and it was funny because we were watching from kind of a restaurant area, and the only way people knew that it was over were the poor servers at the outdoor tables, and they said, “Yes, it's over.” (laughs)
Greg: Yeah, they had clearly experienced this multiple times a day, many days in their life.
As for the Glockenspiel and its performance, I'm glad that we did it. But it leaves you a little underwhelmed because there's so much buildup, and the way it kind of happens, there's just the confusion. And you can't appreciate it quite as much.
Jen: But I'm sure when it first started, it was an amazing thing to see because it was new technology.
Greg: So in any case...
That's pretty much the main things we did in Munich. And while we have been chastised by both Germans and non-Germans alike for missing Berlin, we are so glad that we got to go to Munich.
Jen: Yeah, the city itself and the Bavarian countryside was absolutely enchanting.
Greg: The next update definitely takes a turn… for the worse. There's a train ride that I can only describe with one word. Disaster.
Plus, we were going to Prague, and the first thing we had planned in the Czech Republic is a tour of Bohemian Switzerland National Park. And the way I like to describe to people that tour is to tell them…
It's the time we almost died. So there's a teaser for you!
Jen: Spoiler alert, we did not die.
Greg: Yes (laughs) obviously we did not die!
Jen: (laughs)
Greg: So, thanks for checking in!
Jen: And we'll see you at the next stop!
