Toward Austria

Day Three

We awoke early and had a typical German breakfast of deli meats, cheeses, and breads. My cousin also put out butter and "marmalade" pronounced "mahr-muh-lahd'-ah" - jelly. Today we were going to see one of the palaces of King Ludwig II. In the US he is sometimes referred to as Mad Ludwig. We had a long travel to reach the Chiemsee where the palace is located. Ludwig built this palace on an island in the middle of a large inland lake. The crossing was on a ferry. It was a short trip, with a wonderful view of the German Alps. Ludwig lived in the middle 1800's when Bavaria was an independent state. He used his personal wealth to construct castles. He was also obsessed with Wagner's music and King Louis XIV of France - the Sun King. Herren-Cheimsee is his tribute to Versailles.


The palace was never completed as he ran out of money. However, some of the things that he had built into it were astounding. He had a simulated marble created that was more expensive that marble itself but was able to create colors unavailable in real marble. The table in his private dining room could drop through the floor and panels of matching carpet slid into place to fill the hole. That way he never had to leave his private quarters to eat. And, the whole palace had central heat. Furnaces in the basement fed heat through cavities in the walls and allowed heat to be released through grillwork in wall panels. The Hall of Mirrors is actually longer and taller than the one in Versailles.

After the palace we were on the road again to Austria. We stopped at a small village that was technically in Germany but was Austrian by nature. The Maypole and frescoed wall of the local Gasthaus show its character. After getting lunch, we started on the road to Salzburg and then to Schmadling for the night. An accident had the highway shut down so my cousin (knowing the roads from traveling with her truck driver husband) pointed us off the autobahn and onto roads that wound through towns until she said to stop in the next parking lot we could find. I did, She jumped out and returned with a sticker for the windshield - a requirement in Austria.

It was getting dark by the time we arrived at the small resort hotel where we'd spend the night. After checking in and getting our things up to the room we gazed out at the dwindling twilight and the mountains across the valley. A trip down to the restaurant and a good meal before heading back upstairs to get some sleep. But not before my wife and I did some laundry in the hotel laundrymat. THAT took too long and I was tired before the dryer finally stopped. But we had clean clothes for another length of the trip. Back upstairs and into bed after telling our two 20-something kids that they needed to get some sleep (still excited I guess).