Favorite and Least Favorite

May 19: Munich was a bit of a surprise to us.   We only added it onto our itinerary because it was so much cheaper to rent a car there than in Switzerland or Italy, but we really ended up enjoying our short time there.

It's a beautiful city with interesting history, reasonable prices, and many lovely buildings.   And best of all, it seemed like such a cheerful place.   So many of the cities we visited seemed entirely peopled with unhappy citizens who were unfriendly and rarely smiled, while Munich seemed to be filled with the nicest people.  

It was pouring rain while we were there (surprise!), but we thoroughly enjoyed our walk through the center of town, including  a charming little market that sold a fun variety of food and souvenirs.

Unfortunately we didn't give ourselves as much time in Munich as I would have preferred, but it was time to move on to the rest of our journey!     First stop:   Neuschwanstein Castle!   

Actually, this first picture isn't of Neuschwanstein, but of nearby Hohenschwangau Castle, which was one of the childhood homes of King Ludwig and a big part of the inspiration for him to build Neuschwanstein where he did.   

He was a bit of a recluse and was drawn to the idyllic and beautiful setting of these lovely mountains of Bavaria.

He built Neuschwanstein high up on a hilltop to be a place for solitude and repose.  The hilltop location, however, made it difficult to build and he never saw it fully finished in his lifetime.   

The architecture is stunningly beautiful and it's so picturesque that it's actually used as a model for the Walt Disney castle.  

For as picturesque as the castle is though, it's actually quite challenging to get a good picture of it.   You can either see it from far away....

Or from right up close...

It's quite a trek to get up the hill to the castle from the parking areas, but our kids are troupers and have finally reached a point in their development that they do not complain about long walks anymore!  Hallelujah!

Thankfully we had a bunch of umbrellas that we had procured during our rainy day in Rome!

And there were some hot pretzels to give us a little energy for the long wet walk down!

It ended up being one of our favorite stops of the whole trip, which was good, because after our visit there, we were off to one of our least favorite stops of our whole trip.

Lucerne, Switzerland.  

I thought I'd done my due diligence and picked a great city to stop in, but, alas, it lacked personality, was grossly expensive, wasn't all that pretty (the city itself), and the people were among the unfriendliest we met on our whole trip.   The best part about Lucerne was the scenic drive in and out of the city.

That is why I don't have a single picture of Lucerne and would not recommend it to someone planning their own trip to Europe.

Stay tuned for more European adventures to come!

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