The Castles of Schwangau
The village of Schwangau is in Bavaria close to the Austrian border and nestled in the Alpine foothills. The bucolic countryside is known for green pastures and grazing cows which produce outstanding milk and cheese. It reminded me of the scenery in the 1964 Best Picture winner, Mary Poppins. Two castles dominate the village of Schwangau — at least from the tourism perspective. Hohenschwangau Castle was the childhood home of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The adjacent, and more famous, Neuschwanstein Castle was King Ludwig’s own creation.
Although the Neuschwanstein Castle is the number one tourist attraction in Bavaria drawing about 1.5 million tourists per year, it has not been on my Bucket List of must-see-before-I-die. Oktoberfest in Munich is visited on average by 6 million residents and tourists over a two-week period and is more commonly measured by liters of beer sold, (6.9 million in 2018). I did join the frenzy of Oktoberfest, only once in 20 years. In my Florida Snowbird nesting grounds, Disneyland draws almost 50 million tourists from around the world and it is most certainly not on my Bucket List.
I liked Hohenschangau best because it overlooked the Alpsee.
A fortuitous occasion brought us to Schwangau. It was the biennial reunion of Christl’s high school classmates. I joined them to get a closer look at the reunions and meet the girls for whom I had prepared slideshows for the past five reunions. The slideshows were the collection of photos from attendees then applying the “Ken Burns Effect” of panning and zooming still images. The first slideshow background music was Sean Connery singing the Beatles In My Life and the most recent slideshow Frank Sinatra’s It Was A Very Good Year. I had also asked the girls to collect photographs from their days in high school and this was set to the song by Queen, We are the Champions.
We sat for an evening of binge watching all the slideshows from an overhead projector in a chapel. It was very emotional for the girls and me too. On the humorous side, I was asked to make the caption in a bigger font so the aging girls could read them. They also commented on the same clothes worn year-after-year. By way of an excuse, one of them said “We were born of a generation that didn’t throw things away.”
But getting back to Schwangau: We stayed at a Lutheran retreat/hotel right below Neuschwanstein. We could see the turret of the Neuschwanstein castle above the trees from the hotel. The hotel offered breakfast before in addition to a Lutheran prayer-breakfast to the accompaniment of a solo trumpet.
We hiked to both castles. The other 1.5 million tourists took buses and horse drawn wagons. The Neuschwanstein castle hike was the more arduous climbing alongside a gorge for about 45 minutes, but the reward was seeing Mary’s Bridge over the gorge crammed with tourists.
It was a delightful gathering of the Girls. I am looking forward to the reunion in 2021.
