21:10
Milan, Italy
Today is another long travel day. It's actually day one of two consecutive long travel days. But first let me catch you up with what happened over the last couple days.
I believe I last wrote about the day Jessica and I met Lyndsay and Tommy in Munich and hiked up to that monastery/brewery at Andechs. That was a really fun day. Sadly, I had been (and still am, actually) nursing a minor head cold (really just noticeable by sinus issues). I think my minor illness coupled with the beer, the hike, and all the running about I've done for the last couple weeks warranted a rest day. So that's pretty much all I did the next day. I stayed at the hostel, finalized and posted those most recent blog posts, did laundry, and just rested. While there were things I would've liked to have seen and done that day in Munich, a day of rest was desperately needed. On top of that, it was raining pretty hard and generally just miserable weather that day. So it worked out to be a perfect day to take it easy.
The next day, however, we started out again full throttle. We started by getting up long before dawn to go to the train station and buy our reservations for the trip we're on right now before catching a 7:30am train to a small village (Fuessen--at least that was the name of the train stop--not necessarily the name of the town) in where two famous castles are: the Hohenschwangau Castle and the even more famous Neuschwanstein Castle (the castle Disney modeled Cinderella's Castle after).
Unfortunately they wouldn't allow us to take photos or videos of the interior of the castles, so I rigged up my iPhone so just the camera part stuck out of my breast pocket and left the record on. Unfortunately it shut off after just four or so minutes, and pretty much all you can see are the backs of the people in front of me as we walk through the first four minutes of the tour. It's pretty worthless, but I'll post it anyway in case you're interested.
Hohenschwangau is the castle where King Ludwig II grew up. Supposedly his bedroom window looked out directly at the hilltop where he decided to build his famous Neuschwanstein castle that was dedicated to the operas of Wagner (Ludwig's favorite). Because they were dedicated to these operas you won't find any pictures of the King himself--in fact, in only one place at all do you even see his coat of arms. Every room, every wall is covered with paintings and things displaying scenes from the different operas. The castle, sadly, was never completed by the time of the king's mysterious death in his 40's.
Because of the price to go in to the castles, Jessica and I decided to only see the interior of the one, the unfinished Neuschwanstein--which truly was remarkable--and forewent seeing the interior of Hohenschwangau. One of the hallways the king even had made to appear like a cave--I swear he hired Disney Imagineers to build it.
As we were walking from the one castle to the other we just happened to run into Lyndsay and Tommy who coincidentally also spent the day at these castles--in fact, they had only missed the same train we took by a few minutes. We decided to have dinner together, and once we got back in the city found a delicious Italian place not to far from the train station.
So that was yesterday. Today, as I said, is a long day of travel. Jessica and I had been debating what to do since next month we have to be back in Germany (Cologne, in fact) to meet up with Terri and Neal. But we also wanted to hit as much of the south (Greece and Italy) before it starts to get too hot and before the tourism hits in full force this summer. We thought maybe we'd wind our way down Italy, and fly from Greece to Cologne, but we looked up the flights and they were about €100 each. So we decided to scoot directly to Greece as fast as possible via rail and ferry and then slowly wind our way back up through Italy to arrive in Cologne on time. So today we left ungodly early again (7:13am train) to Zurich, Switzerland where we got to spend about 5 hours checking out the town,
and where I got some delicious Swiss chocolate.
We then took the train to Milan, Italy where we are now. At 23:00 we should be on board our sleeper coachette bound for Bari (one of Italy's southernmost cities) which we'll arrive at at around 08:00. Then we have twelve hours to explore Bari before taking the overnight ferry that arrives in Greece the next morning. I've never taken an overnight ferry before (not counting cruise ships), so I'm excited about that. Supposedly our first class rail pass gets us a free "dorm" on the ferry. Can't wait!
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