The Report

Okay, here we go. It'll be long. I'll divide it into chapters so that you can read it in more than one sitting. Here's the table of contents:

I. Thursday: the drive, the castle, and the hotel in Munich

II. Friday: Dachau, fire and flood, Salzburg

III. Saturday: Eagle's Nest, more Salzburg

IV. Sunday: church in Salzburg, Vienna, a dang nice hotel

V. Monday: more Vienna

VI. Tuesday: more Vienna

VII. Wednesday: leaving Vienna, Oberammergau, GPS misadventures, the drive home

VIII. Random observations

I. Thursday

On Thursday, the Woods and the Bundersons hit the road for Germany. It was fairly uneventful. We drove about three and a half hours to Neuschwanstein, a castle built by King Ludwig, also sometimes known as "Mad King Ludwig." After seeing the castle, I'm willing to believe that he was a bit nuts. The whole thing was basically built as a shrine to the composer Richard Wagner. (If I'm Wagner, I'm a little creeped out by all the attention.) Wagner never saw the inside of the castle, and Ludwig died before it was completed.

Even though the castle was gorgeous, it left me feeling a little empty. Everything inside was beautiful, but it was hard to get past the self-indulgence. This guy even built a room that was designed to be a theater for performances with an audience of one: himself. How weird would it be to be the only person in a theater watching a Wagner opera with a cast of dozens?

As it did every day during our vacation, it started to rain during the afternoon, but we had our umbrellas, so we just walked back down from the castle to our car and headed to Munich. The hotel was interesting. It looked more like a converted apartment building. They gave us a key that weighed about five pounds, which I suppose makes it awfully hard to lose the hotel key. I've stayed in worse hotels.

II. Friday
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We weren't sure how long we were going to spend at Dachau. We ended up being there for about six hours. It was quite an experience. We took a tour with headphones so we could go at our own speed and see what we wanted to see. As I mentioned before, it's one thing to try to imagine life in a concentration camp, but it's another to actually see where they slept, how little space they had, where the bodies were buried and burned, and everything else that goes along with life and death in a concentration camp. We didn't much feel like taking pictures, but we did take one of a sculpture that I think captures the spirit of the place:

The whole experience made me want to go back to 1930s Germany and start asking people what in the world they were thinking. I'll grant that many of them may have been ignorant of what exactly was going on in the camps, but people certainly knew what Hitler was about and knew what they were supporting.

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We had some interesting weather while we were there. We'd spent most of the day outside. We eventually worked our way to the museum and were in there for quite a while. As usual, it started to rain. It rained hard, and it kept raining hard. It got so intense that lightning hit the building. It's a good thing we had already watched the movie, because the lightning fried the electronics, and they couldn't show the move anymore that day.

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As I mentioned, it rained hard. That explains the picture that I posted yesterday. When we got the parking lot at the end of the day, it was flooded. The lot wasn't graded very well and didn't have very good drainage. I had to get my shoes wet to get to the car, but we weren't as bad off as the poor soul whose car I showed you yesterday. I suppose he had to wait for the water to drain and then try to start the car, but I think the water was high enough that it probably ruined the car. We were parked a few stalls away, and we were very glad that we didn't have to deal with a flooded car.

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Dachau is on the outskirts of Munich. To reunite with the Bundersons in Salzburg, we needed to go through or around Munich. Neither one went well. Munich was a big parking lot. It was probably the combination of the heavy rain and the fact that it was a Friday afternoon, but we went about twenty kilometers in an hour and a half. Not fun.
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We finally got out of that and made our way to our next hotel, which was right in the middle of Salzburg. It was a fun location. The heart of Salzburg was a fun place to be, with lots of outdoor restaurants and shops and people walking around (until the rain chased them away).

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III. Saturday

Saturday morning, Stace and I, along with Stuart and two of the Bunderson girls, drove back into Germany to Kehlsteinhaus, also known as the Eagle's Nest, which was a birthday present to Hitler. We were supposed to have a tour in English, but the tour never happened, which was a little frustrating. Nevertheless, it was gorgeous. I've been to the top of a few mountains in Switzerland, but this was just about as nice. Pictures don't do it justice, but I'll toss in a couple.

After we came down from there, we went back to Salzburg and visited a museum that was a building where Mozart used to live. That evening, we just kind of wandered around. Street life is a lot more vibrant in a place like that than most places I've been in the States. As we were walking around, we came to a carving competition. There were artisans there carving sculptures out of wood, stone, and marble. They were impressive. While they were carving, there was a saxophone quintet walking around, playing and having fun. That was one of Stace's favorite parts of the trip.

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Later that evening, we rode a train to the top of a cliff that looks over Salzburg.

IV. Sunday

On Sunday, we said goodbye to the Bundersons, who drove back to Amsterdam to fly back to the States. Stace and I continued on to Vienna.

Our hotel in Vienna was right in the heart of the city, just like in Salzburg, so we had a choice: pay $140 to park near the hotel for three days, or pay $13 to park on the outskirts of Vienna and take the underground into the center of the city. As you can guess, we parked in the outskirts and took the underground, but of course, this turned into a mini-adventure.

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When we parked in the ramp and were walking toward the station to catch the underground, we saw a sign in German. We couldn't understand every word, but we could read enough to understand that the underground wasn't running to that station for a couple of weeks due to maintenance on the tracks. That meant that we needed to figure out where to catch a bus to another station, then catch the underground the rest of the way into the city. It worked out okay, but it's a good illustration of the fun of international travel.

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The hassle was worth it, though, because we were able to spend three nights at one of the top hotels in the world, the Hotel Sacher Wien. The cheap rooms there run upwards of $400 a night, but due to a set of circumstances I won't bother to detail here, we were able to stay for free. It was awesome. I was afraid they'd have to drag me out kicking and screaming. They brought us fresh fruit, they cleaned our room twice a day, and it was air-conditioned (a rarity in Europe).

V. Monday

On Monday, we visited St. Stephan's Cathedral, a classic old cathedral in Vienna. It's several hundred years old. I toured the catacombs underneath, where hundreds of people have been buried over the centuries. That was really interesting.

Later that day, we visited museums from the last days of the ruling family in Vienna. The people got rid of the monarchy in 1918, but it was interesting to learn about the history leading up to that time. We also did some of that on Tuesday.

And here's an interesting bit of street art I saw walking around. This kind of thing isn't unusual in Vienna. These folks would just stand there like statutes and would only move when someone dropped money in the dish. Then one of them would bow. (You just don't see that kind of thing in Lakeville.)

VI. Tuesday

On Tuesday, we visited another museum and did some shopping. We went back to St. Stephan's to do more of a tour, and then I found out that I could climb up one of the towers. It was about 350 steps. Those of you who know my morning exercise routine here in Switzerland know that I found that challenge irresistible, so I went for it. I was able to get a good look at Vienna.

VII. Wednesday

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On Wednesday, we got up early to make the long drive home. I wept bitter tears as I checked out of the Hotel Sacher Wien, because I'll probably never have anyone treat me that well again in my whole life. Of course, we got confused taking the underground back to the car in light of the construction and so forth, but we figured it out. We had to swing back through Salzburg since Stace had left her favorite pillow at the hotel, and Salzburg was a traffic nightmare. After that, we decided to make a side trip to Oberammergau, Germany, the quaint little town where they put on the Passion Play every ten years. That led to some interesting experiences with the GPS. The GPS can be both a blessing and a curse. (More on that later.) We ended up rolling back into town at around 10:00 Wednesday night. Whew!

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VIII. Random observations
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First, a comment about pay toilets. At first, it seems decidedly un-American to charge someone to go to the bathroom. I mean, what's next? Pretty soon, they're going to start putting water in bottles and making you pay for those, too. Anyway, there is an upside to charging for pay toilets. Any bathroom where I have to pay is pretty much spotless. I think it's worth 50 cents to have a pleasant bathroom experience rather than one where you have to hold your nose, don't you?

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Second, a comment about GPS. We realized that it only gets you so far. After our GPS gave us nonsensical instructions that basically amounted to, "Drive through this German woman's vegetable garden without damaging the tomatoes," we decided we'd had enough. We started to ignore it. Lo and behold, we got there twenty minutes faster than the GPS said we would. The moral of the story is that GPS can be helpful, but it's better to supplement it with a good map and a good navigator.

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Third, driving on the German autobahn is fun. I hit 160 km/h, which is around a hundred miles per hour. I didn't do it for long, but it was fun while it lasted. If you're not prepared to really haul, though, you'd better stay out of the left lane. Those drivers are serious.

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Fourth, we love Austria. We had a lot of fun, and it's a very lively place. It was interesting to just walk around and get a feel for Salzburg and Vienna.