Castle-hopping

Our recent family road-trip through Bavaria into Austria could fairly be described as a castle-hopping tour of spectacular Germanic fortresses. That wasn’t our original intention. In the beginning, we had hoped that both my mother and her mother would join us. Both had lived in Germany for a few years in the early 1970s and my grandmother was interested in having an authentic meal in a German gasthaus again. But my grandmother wasn’t feeling up to the trip, so she remained in the US.

We knew we wanted to visit two or three locations over the course of six or seven days that were easily reachable by car and had something our boys might enjoy. As we looked into it, the trip began to shape up around Füssen, Germany on the front end, because we really wanted to see Neuschwanstein, and Salzburg, Austria at the tail end because we love that city and have a friend who owns a summer apartment there above Café Tomaselli that we could use. I had been interested in seeing Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest for some time and, when Steph mentioned the forthcoming trip to a friend, he highly recommended the natural beauty of Berchtesgaden. So that completed the triumvirate.

We saw and experienced a lot on our trip – the stunning landscapes and natural beauty were breath-taking, the trip into the salt mines under the mountain was fun, the churches and cathedrals were spectacular, and so on – but the grand fortresses of past rulers definitely served as the spine of our trip.

In Füssen, our hotel looked out on the Hohes Schloss, beneath the walls of which our boys picked flowers and rolled in the grass, and we toured two of King Ludwig II’s palaces - Hohen Schwangau and the famously striking, Neuschwanstein.

In Berchtesgaden, we intended to visit Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, but it didn’t open until the following week (poor planning on my part), so we had to ‘settle’ for the Konigliches Schloss.

From there, we stopped by Hohenwerfen fortress in Austria for a bird-of-prey show against a misty mountainous backdrop over a lush valley on the way to Salzburg.

In Salzburg, we saw the opulent Residenz of the former Prince Archbishops and the surrounding cemeteries and catacombs. We also toured the imposing fortress, Festung Hohensalzburg, arguably Salzburg’s most identifiable landmarks overlooking the city and surrounding vale. We considered visiting the beautiful Mirabell or surprising Hellbrunn, again, but we had seen them on a previous visit and were all castled-out by that point.

For all our friends or family interested in visiting, all of these places are within 2-4 hours of our home by car.