Day 8: Neuschwanstein Castle Tour

The resort offers a lot of tours. Many of these can be done on your own but I highly recommend doing this one with them. I'll go into detail on that in a minute.

We had to be out front for the bus tour at 8:30 so we were rushing a bit. It was starbucks cafe for breakfast and off we went!


I'm pretty sure this tour was $40/adult. The kids were free as long as they were under 4 and sat on your lap. We lucked out as the bus wasn't totally full so we had seats for Val anyway! You take a large comfy greyhound type bus and a few stops along the way.

First we stopped at a small wood carving souvenir shop out in the country. Prices here were very reasonable, some things cheaper than I'd seen so far. I bought the girls some wooden blocks and a carved easter egg for my easter tree.


Along the way, our tour guide told us funny stories and trivia about the area. She was great and actually very entertaining. Our next stop was a small town/village called ------. We had just enough time to pet a goat, wave to the cows, and check out the church before moving on. That was all of the town actually. It was very cute.





We arrived 40 mnutes later to the castle, which is across the border in Austria. There were swarms of people. The line for tickets was probably an hour long! Apparently you get grouped into bunches to go through the castle and there are specific times given to you. For this reason alone I recommend going with Edelweiss if you can as we had our tickets already and walked right in with our guide, who spoke *English*.

The castle itself is beautiful. It was King Ludwig II's. Apparently he only lived in it for something like 179 days before he was found dead with his psychiatrist? something like that.. it's apparently a mystery to this day how that happened or what the actual reason for his death was. The people in Germany love King L. and have festivals for him. He was said to be close to the common people. This is a little hard to believe seeing his castle but you see his influence around town. His favorite animal was the swan, and you can still see swan statues and gargoyles around the town as well as around the castle.


The castle is said to be the basis for Cinderella's castle in Disney World. (Honestly I remember hearing the same thing about a castle I saw in Spain but it does look fairly close).

P.S. Pardon the spot on the picture(s) which needs to be photoshopped. I have no time for that these days people.. crying toddlers!
You can't take photos inside so I obviously only have a few!
These next two photos are pictures of the castle across the way. I wish I wrote it down but I can't remember.. I want to say it was for his father or something. anyone know? We didn't go inside that one.





It was a nice tour. Valerie, of course, had been anticipating the castle for days (Grandma gave her a post card which she carried around). She danced around for us, pretending to be Belle in the ballroom while the guide talked. Ellie luckily slept in the backpack through most of this tour. Definitely don't bring a stroller here! I think we climbed over 300 stairs in the castle total, all of which corkscrew around winding staircases! If your kids can't deal with the long walk up to the castle, you can take a bus for a euro or two. I recommend this. We walked down.


We had a fantastic lunch at a little spot at the bottom of the hill and the best black forest cake I've ever had in my life. Ellie was dancing and giggling with every bite. It was quite entertaining.

The girls slept on the bus back and were good to go. That night was bbq buffet at the hotel- much better than chinese night. It got cold and rainy later so we just watched some olympic swimming and headed to bed!