Final Male/Female Blog, from back home

We spent a couple nights in a town south of Augsburg (NOT on the 'Romantic Road'—more like Yonkers in rush hour), from whence we visited Dachau.  Pamela then found a beautiful spa in Bad Kohlgrub for our final RR 3-night stay—you've seen the chairlift.  Then we drove to Munich, turned in the rental car, had a rainy day there touring museums (if the BMW Museum counts too), a night in Milano in a very hip airport hotel, and flew to JFK the next day.  During the latter stretch, we spent 7 straight nights in different hotels—no bueno.  Never again.

We had intended to head for Füssen and Mad King Ludwig's most famous castle, Neuschwanstein (you know - Disneyland in Germany), but to avoid the glut of tourists there, we swung to the west and our spa. So before departing it we day-tripped to another of his castles, Linderhof—as it turns out, the only one he completed, and the one he died in. (Sort of—he was found in a nearby lake.)  Limited photos, since cameras were not allowed inside during the 30-minute guided rush through the interior of a rich psycho's idea of a wedding cake. (But that's just my opinion.)  It's too bad he wasn't drowned as a baby. (Ditto.)  I have to say, the grounds were nice.

Please! Not another castle!!

Nice backyard—Bavaria really is beautiful.

Goddamned front door

External Linderhof inhabitant: more elegant than the castle by far

That same day, we stopped in Oberammergau, normally an overrun tourist magnet but blissfully vacant on a rainy, misty Sunday. Very, very pretty, especially in fall colors. Distinctive Bavarian architecture and a hotbed of cuckoo-clock making (yuck).

Oberammergau's former town hall (maybe)

A detail: the three-D paintwork is best seen up close. Take binoculars.

More trompe-l'oiel cutesiness

We spent our final day in Munich before hopping to Milano for the flight home. No Oktoberfest, gracias: that tourist-aversion thing...  Got a recommendation from friend Julia for a hotel in a youthful, hip area near the massive museums. Stores were closed for Reunification Day, but Pamela managed to see three of the art museums, while I caught the subway to the BMW complex across town.

Some Munich museum—not sure about the alien spacecraft out front

The BMW Museum

What's that punk doing on my next bike?

He should drive this

The superior Emirates wafted us over to JFK—and eventually we got home. Gratuitous photos:

Easy Jet to Milano

NYC photos courtesy of David Hewitt, who met us in NYC for the Rauschenberg show at MoMA:

Midtown

St. Patrick's in the afternoon light

Empire State Bldg. @ night

NYC tourists (we like the dark focus)

Amateur Tour Tips:

*  Budapest is wonderful.  Like Prague, but less expensive and fewer crowds. I'd give you the address of my yoga-instructor amiga—but no.

*  The Danube trip did not live up to our Rhine trip on Viking. The boat and staff were just as good, but the logistics (locks and canals and distances from dock to town) precluded a lot of independent flexibility that we had on the Rhine.

*  I had heard so much about Austria, but have no urge to see it again. Your mileage may vary. (We skipped the long and $$ day trip to Salzburg, but our Kiwi amigos got hosed.  Of course they were too nice to say so.) Pamela does not agree here...

*  Without exception, the German river stops were superior: Passau, Regensburg, and Nuremberg.  They just do everything right.

*  Ok, obviously we're biased about DE—we spent nearly 2 weeks there after leaving the barge, and it was hawesome.  If things went awry, and we lost our way down the 'Romantic Road', the worst that occurred was a pedestrian hotel that made any Holiday Express look like shite. We even forgive the rental car, now. 

*  Rothenburg was incredible.  We missed a bunch of other towns along the 'Road' due to our inability to use the GPS—but if they're all that good, go.

*  The final 3 nights in southern Bavaria were a treat.  Not a lot to do, but so what?  Murnau and Oberammergau was a bonus side-trip.  It's astoundingly beautiful.

*  We saw three autumns—in Bavaria, then New England, and then Seattle, as we moved along. Lucky peeps.
*  We no longer trust Rick Steves, or whoever writes his books for him now. High-handed dismissals or omissions of great places, an overweening use of "my" and "I" in the prose. His group tours are still good, though.  

Capitol Hill, Seattle:

 La Myrtle, waiting for us in the mail box:

Short, and very sad - Dachau:

Fairly innocuous entry gate

"Work will set you free" - the first lie upon entering

The prison was about 10 times this big - these are barracks foundations, that's the crematorium in the background

Scale model of the prison

Monument to the victims

The atrocity referenced in "The Reader"

The network of prisons just in Bavaria - they were built in impoverished rural areas that 'needed jobs'

All the European prisons

This is just a glimpse of what we saw.  The museum is huge, and information is overwhelming.  Credit to the Krauts for making it a primary part of the history curriculum in their schools.  

If you get to D.C. go to the Holocaust Museum, if you can bear it.

First Female Rides the Romantic Road

Ah, the glories of the Romantische Strasse, which we'd hoped to follow for some five days in our rental car, staying in one adorable, quaint village after another. Alas, in late September many other folks had the same idea, and we ran into problems. First, No Room at the (affordable) Inn. Lisa had booked our first night by phone, fortunately, but thereafter we were consigned to unromantic digs. Second, actually finding and staying on that romantic trail was not so easy: it wiggles through a couple of parallel routes onto which we were repeatedly shunted, and when we found the road again it often stranded us at dead ends in pedestrian-only zones in those cutesy towns. Third, our car baffled us with its refusal to let us lead; Lisa had had to show us how to start the damned thing, to begin with, using the push button and brake. It was an "upgrade" for low-grade drivers.



But... our first stop, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, was all Romance and Charm. We walked the city walls, wandered the medieval center, and no doubt quaffed a beer. The town wasn't hideously thronged with tourists, so I don't know where all those people keeping us out of hotels were...

The medieval walls of Rothenburg

It was a lovely fall day, marred only by Paul's anxiety over our "unlocked" car trunk (resolved by a side trip to a helpful Mazda dealer). We visited 14th-century St. Jakob's church (one stop along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage) to see the amazing Tilman Riemenschneider carved altarpiece, and then gawked at another carving from a single ebony tree, the gift of an African sister church.

Access to the wall through towers


  

Riemenschneider was a German contemporary of Michelangelo

Souls on their journey to God

Back on the road we got lost, then lost, then lost again, but all within an increasingly beautiful landscape as we moved south from Franconia into Bavaria. Driving is a joy in Germany, except for reading the signs. The irritants of being lost are mitigated when all around you is clean, tidy, rational, picturesque, and unmarred by billboards. (And once we finally came to an agreement with our GPS, the lost part pretty much ceased. A really detailed map would have been even more helpful.)

German tourist dreams of Tuscany

We ended our search for shelter on the workaday commercial drag of Königsbrunn, staying for two nights in a functional but charmless motel. Luckily, an excellent Italian joint faced it. The next morning we set off for Dachau through back roads, on a side trip. The Dachau camp, once you find it, is no joy ride, but was essential to see. Excellent, exhaustive museum charting the rise of the concentration camp network in a cleaned-up yet still wrenching complex of barracks. We ran out of time (and spirit) to visit the Crematorium...

Delayed Male Post:

Pardon the bloggus interruptus—I blame the Esposa.

So when we left off we were staying @ Casa Doris in Bessenbach, which was the Lap of Luxury and difficult to leave.  See for yourself:

Beautiful house

Beautiful gardens

Pamela also wanted to include a photo of these ubiquitous little German plumbing items. We failed to photograph them at Doris', but you get the idea...

I think it's a washer and dryer

Early into our stay, we met up with Doris' friends, Adolf and Christine, who gave us a great tour of downtown Frankfurt, including the Dom, main plaza, Opera House, and Goethe's house.  They were gracious hosts and went way out of their way to provide us with copious information about Frankfurt.

The iPad decided on b&w for this one...

Main Plaza

Shopping street decor. I didn't take this!

Opera House

Frankfurt is a financial center—look out, London.

Paulo and Adolfo

Christine and  Doris

"Grey Bus" memorial to the "mentally unfit" who were taken away in them, windows covered, by you-know-who.

Catholics on a wall

And before we left Bessenbach, we visited Michael Pohl's (an amigo grande from Vallarta) brother-in-law Carlos and his esposa Sonja, who teach school there.  Extremely engaging and energetic family:

Pamela, Sonja, Doris, Carlos, and my beer

Carlos and hijos, on Pinche Miguel's BMW 1150 GS

In my dreams

At some point it became necessary to stop mooching, rent a car, and start our journey down the "Romantic Road" that winds down into Bavaria from Würzburg to Füssen, southwest of Munich.  Our car (a Mazda) was too high-tech for us—it had no key (started and stopped by push-button), we couldn't lock the trunk, and found out how to work the GPS and stereo only on our last day.  (You must fire everything up before driving, and only after you "Agree" with the dashboard that 'Distracted driving is dangerous.'  Crypto-fascists.)

No photos of that fkg car.  Next time, we'll rent something simpler.  Maybe a donkey.

Todd & Tracy Walker's goat and donkey, who were rescued from the Napa fires