Neuschwanstein Castle and Mary's Bridge. . .

The Fairytale Castle - Neuschwanstein

The hike up to the castle made me break out in a sweat! I would have taken the horse-drawn carriage, but we wanted the exercise. Coming around a corner, we turned around to see our first glimpse of the castle up close. It's really breathtaking and beautiful.

The view from the top, with Lake Forggensee in the background.

The entrance is through the burnt-orange section.

The Bavarian Alps are in the back. It was May 31 and the mountain peaks were still very much capped with snow!

What you would see upon entering the gates. . .

From the castle looking out. . .

The courtyard. . .

Our tour was quick and less impressive than the tour of Hohenschwangau. It was incredibly difficult to understand our guide. "This is the room where the king was entertained," became "Zis is zee vroom var zee keeeng vas onterteeened." My brain hurt by the end of the tour. I eventually tuned her out because I couldn't understand her accent. We weren't allowed to take pictures so it's hard to remember exactly what we saw. The rooms were big and elegant. I do remember the hand-carved pieces of furniture were beyond impressive. It had to have taken years for someone to create those masterpieces. The tile floors were intricately designed and absolutely fascinating.

Once we were through the tour, we were allowed to take pictures. The ones below are of the replica near the the gift shop. It's impressive to see the castle in its entirety. I vaguely remember my mom having a small replica that she had from when she lived in Germany.

King Ludwig's fairy-tale castle was amazing.

As beautiful as it was inside, I was way more enthralled with the outside. I could stare at this view for hours. No wonder it inspired Disney!

After hiking up to Mary's Bridge in the rain, we read that we could hike a little further for an even more impressive view. We were a little tight on time, but Kevin and I are always up for a little adventure. Our guide book said, "the frisky can hike even higher to the Beware-Danger of Death signs and an even more glorious castle view." I was feeling frisky and we didn't see any death signs, so we took the path less traveled and hiked for another 15 minutes. A more glorious castle view is what we were rewarded with!

Neuschwanstein on the right, Hohenschwangau and Lake Alpsee on the left. My cell phone beeped at me and said, "Welcome to Austria." I'm not sure if we were in Austria, but we were sure close! Had we had more time, I'm sure we would have kept hiking. This was where we turned around, though.

Did I mention it was raining the entire time?

We were feeling fairy-tale-ish:)

This was our little path. We kept our eyes on it because one wrong step could have sent us to our deaths, or at least given us a few broken bones! We saw a total of five other people on our hike. It was awesome. Those are the kinds of experiences we like to have! Touristy places are great, but this hike was definitely a highlight of our visit to Neuschwanstein! Way to go Rick Steves!

Standing on Mary's Bridge. The bridge was built over 100 years ago! I can't even imagine how they did it!

Mary's Bridge from our hike down. Yep, we were up there!

At the bottom of the gorge, there were little cairns near the river. Normally, I've seen these used to mark trails leading to the summit of a mountain (like when Kevin and I hiked Pike's Peak in '05). I'm not sure why these were here, but they were neat. Had we not been pressed for time, I would have built one as well. 

You can see the old stone wall that used to be a bridge. Seems like it might have been safer than Mary's Bridge, but apparently it wasn't high enough!

From this point, we could still see Mary's Bridge - it's on the top right of this photo.

We had a scenic, fun hike down to the bottom and then back to our car. These last two pictures are close the end. I'm not sure exactly what this used to be, but it looks like an ancient way of using water for energy. Some parts of the contraption were still intact.

Rushing water. . .

Neuschwanstein Castle - there's quite a bit of history that I didn't touch on, but it's a fascinating place in so many ways. Sadly, though, this fairy-tale castle wasn't exactly that for the King. His nickname was "Mad" King Ludwig and he never even got to live here. Six weeks after his death, with the castle still unfinished, tourists began paying to go through it. There are a few life lessons to learn from this but I'll leave it to the reader to go there!

We left the castles and drove almost four hours to a tiny little village near the Black Forrest. Deidesheim is just west of Mannheim and it was the location of Mollie and Christian's wedding, which happened to be the reason we chose to go to Germany for vacation!