I have now had a mountain fix. Mountains AND snow to be exact. The snow in Bavaria is so SNOWY. It’s 2 feet, nay, 3 feet deep and white white white WHITE. It’s fluffinated, caked on candy coating, sugar puff loveliness. And there are fairytale castles there, and mountains. O mountains! covered in conifers and frost-blasted, fog-sweatered trees. We spent the last day of our vacation frantically whisking ourselves around and about because 4 days of foot-pain-induced relative immobility gets old SO damn fast and I was determined to get out of the house at least one day and see something.
We drove to kitsch-central Oberammergau first and browsed the million and one holtzshnitzereis* goggling at the incredible amount of religious whackery that can be carved from wood. I succumbed to Kathe Wolfarht’s Christmas Kindl Mart but didn’t buy everything (wah) that I COULD have bought, if my husband hadn’t been glued to my side, eyeballing my every movement, my every loving examination of oh! just one more wee wooden ornament. sigh
I walked the snow-packed streets with the help of a crutch, while the kids went maniac on the 6-foot high banked snowpiles lining the streets. Icicles from the painted stucco house rooftops reached legendary lengths. We ate schnitzel and spaetzle and thuringerwurst and sauerkraut at a little diner across the street from the Ettaler Abbey, a lovely golden dome set off by the blanketing depths of snow.
On to Ludwig the Mad’s castle playground, only to jar to a shuddering halt at the highway robbing price of the horse carriage ride up the mountain (and not even ALL the way, the bastidges!) which was half price to come down again. Rolling in it, those horse-cabby guys. So we took some zoom closeups of the backside of Neuschwanstein, glowing silvery amid the pines and vowed to return. Anders and Martin took a turn about the outside of the yellow-stone-and-crenelated Hohenschwangau, which sits like a poor relation in the corner while the showy strumpet Neuschwanstein hogs all the attention, while John and Karin (I’m tired!) and my foot rested in a convenient hotel lounge.
The final filip to the day was a quick zoom around the pretty little town of Füssen where John and Simone live, along the River Lech, with the pretty white castle looming on the banks, held in by a long white town wall and stitched around with cobblestone streets. 1 day of sightseeing is NOT ENOUGH.
Today, we bookended our hellacious travel of last week with a matching performance by fog (Munich), delays (Lufthansa) and Murphy’s Law (everyone else). We got up at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m., while a full moon glowed round and silver in the sky, and drove through alternating sunshine and fog to arrive in a completely white-wreathed city. Nearly all flights were cancelled, including ours. We were lucky enough to get rebooked on a direct flight leaving 2 hours after our original departure time (1 p.m.) only to suffer more delays caused by fog, and then unexplained standing around, and then a late plane, and then 2 passengers who checked their luggage but didn’t board, necessitating wasted time while their luggage was found and removed, and THEN a luggage-removing vehicle that broke down while REMOVING THE LUGGAGE requiring rescue maintenance because they couldn’t get it away from our plane so we could back away from the terminal and depart. Original home-arrival time was 1:30 p.m. Actual home-arrival time? 5:30 p.m. We could have driven the whole way and only added an hour to our travel time. Aggravation, incidentally, is spelled with 2 g’s. As in GOOD GOD.
Cool Thing About the Flight: In-flight monitors showing views from cameras tucked under the nose of the plane, which tracked our take-off and view beneath us as we rose into the sky. It showed mostly cloud, however, during the 1.5 hour flight, which wasn’t so different from the extreme breadths of pure white snow we had lifted off from, making me believe we weren’t moving.
Not So Cool Thing About the Flight: In-flight monitors showing views from cameras tucked under the nose of the plane, which ALSO tracked our landing, making me eek in fear as the ground rose VERY FAST, whoa Nellie!, we’re swaying, get that runway in the CENTER OF THE SCREEN! Aaagh!
PS Confidential to the GlitterFart Fairy: 4 packages of 9 Balisto bars for ya!
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Martin: (while getting undressed for bathtime) *farts* Aaahhh…I needed that.
Liz: Good lord, you’re taking after your daddy!
Liz & Martin *giggle madly*
*wood carving emporiums