Day 11--Fussen

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We got in around 8 to get ready for the day and head over to Fussen to see Neuschwanstein Castle—the castle Sleeping Beauty is modeled after.
We took a train from Munich to Fussen. At Fussen we dropped off of bags in lockers at the train station and started walking toward the castle. We thought it was relatively close by but about 20 minutes into the walk we realized it was a lot farther than we thought. So we turned around and headed back towards the bus stop to see if a bus could get us there. Luckily it could and it took us only a few minutes to get to the castle. Neuschwanstien Castle was built by King Ludwig II in a mountain. From the bottom of the mountain we were able to either walk up the mountain, take a minibus up the mountain or ride in a horse drawn carriage up the mountain. You’ll never guess which one I wanted to do….the horse drawn carriage. We took the carriage ride up and the whole time Justin would start to laugh because one of the horses was farting the whole way up. The carriage let us our a little bit lower than the entrance to the castle. We had about a 5 minute walk up the rest of the way.
When we got to the castle we had about 5 minutes before our tour began so we took a few pictures outside. It was a guided tour through the castle. Neuschwanstein Castle only had about 30% of the 65 rooms completed—even now the castle is not finished. King Ludwig II died before the castle’s completion and after his death the construction of Neuschwanstein Castle was stopped. King Ludwig had a master plan of building four castles, three of which were built and the fourth was never started.
After we finished the tour we could walk by some of the unfinished rooms of the castle—and of course out through the gift shop. We walked back down to where the carriage dropped us off and got something to eat. We bought a cheese pretzel wiener schnitzel and pizza snack. The cheese pretzel wiener schnitzel was some cheese bread with a wiener schnitzel in the middle. After we finished this we were going to grab a sugar pretzel to eat but saw Sweet Bavarian Snowballs (basically airy doughnuts with powdered sugar on them) and had to get those instead.
I again had to take the horse carriage ride down the mountain. But this time we were in the carriage instead of out front so I couldn’t see the horses as well. At the bottom of the mountain, we did some souvenir shopping then looked for a bus to take us to Tegelbahn. While looking for the right bus it started to rain—the first rainy day since the half hour it rained in Dublin. We found our bus and headed over. We were going to take a lift up to the top of the cliff but decided not to because it was overcast and the chance of a good picture of Neuschwanstien was low. We stayed there for a little while then caught a bus back to Fussen. From Fussen we took a train back to Munich and then another train to Salzburg.
It was around 9 pm when we arrived at Salzburg so we found our hostel—YoHo international Youth Hostel—and put of stuff away. Since it was fairly early, we went down to the hostel’s bar and had a few drinks while playing cards. We wanted to order something to eat but the kitchen had run out of food. So we walked down the street to pick up snack food at the corner store.
We wanted to go back to the room and eat the food and type up the day’s events but the other person in our room was already asleep. So we decided to go to bed and write about the day later.