THURSDAY, 9/6:
I apologize in advance today. You're
going to be seeing a LOT of pictures of fountains.
Greetings once again from the sleepy
Bavarian town of Bernau-am-Chiemsee, where we no longer have workers
building a tent underneath our window. Nope; now we have sausages
cooking underneath our window. It's not a bad smell, at least as far
as travel smells go. But when I made the joke yesterday about the
German habit of using every edible part of the pig, I wasn't kidding.
Really, I wasn't.
Today was another castle day, but this
was a very special castle. Loraine's BFF King Ludwig II built
Schloss Herrenchiemsee on an island in the middle of the lake near
which we're staying. And this wasn't just any old castle. Ludwig,
who had this thing for French king Louis XIV, built Herrenchiemsee as
an (almost) exact replica of Versailles, down to the gardens and
fountains. Technically, he both ran out of money and died before finishing it, so
it's not an exact replica, but you can decide for yourself--
Trust me. It's close enough.
As a student of history, both the
castle and the museum attached to it were fascinating. For instance, did you know the castle also served as the place where the West German constitution was drawn up in 1948? I did not know that. And as someone
who dabbles (or tries to) in photography, the grounds sent me into a sensory
overload. And that went double when the water show started. Every
half an hour for five or ten minutes a series of six huge fountains
would shoot water high into the sky and out of the mouths of every
imaginable (and some quite unbelievable) pieces of sculpture. I
swear that I could run around that place for three or four straight
days and not take all the pictures I wanted to take.
So that's why I apologize in advance
for subjecting you to too many fountain pictures. It's not my fault,
though. It's his--
The way the castle grounds were
designed, you could take a picture, move five feet, and see an
entirely different aspect of the grounds and/or the fountains going
off. The symmetry of the place was just incredible, which allowed
you to line shots up just perfectly. Ludwig apparently had a dream
when constructing this castle. It's just sad he never lived to see
that dream actually completed.
Like I said, I apologize in advance for
the torrent of fountain pictures you're going to see. I took (ahem)
almost 160 just of them, and it was gosh darned hard trying to narrow
it down to just five or six.
But here goes. I present to you the
fabulousness (Jim's made up word of the day) of the Herrenchiemsee
fountains--
The splendor--
The glory--
The Greek gods--
The panthers projectile vomiting a
stream of water--
And the genius who thought of doing all
of this--
Even when the water show wasn't going
on, the statues themselves were very cool to look at, especially if
you like angry turtles next to angry iguanas--
Snakes that will give you nightmares--
And Admiral Ackbar, standing in the
middle of it all--
You just know he had to be seeing the
people out to get Ludwig kicked off the throne and telling him “It's
a trap”, right?
Right?
Okay. That's it with the fountains and
the statues. I promise. The grounds did have other things that you
could see, including the ferry boats that brought us over--
A wonderful line of trees that provided
shade on this hot day, another example of the symmetry you see everywhere on the grounds--
Cows off in the distance--
And a robot lawn mower, as well--
Seriously. It's like one of those
robot vacuum cleaners you see in people's homes, except it was
rolling around the grounds cutting grass. Little kids were more
interested in watching that then they were the castle. Heck; they
were even more interested in the robot lawn mower that than they were
looking at Admiral Ackbar, and that's saying something!
That trip to the island and back
basically took up our whole day, but the genius behind our little
tour had one more great idea up her sleeve. Remember a few days ago
when we were driving through a small town and she saw a monument to
her BFF? Well, it's only eight kilometers from here, so we took our
dinner down there, and ate it in a park, with the Alps in the
background--
After exploring that little town, we
were quite impressed, especially by the nexus of biking & hiking
trails that emanate from there. So don't be surprised if, some year
in the future, a blog or two is written from the German town of
Grassau--
Tomorrow we head back to Munich, look
at few more Ludwig related sites (including a castle belonging to his
family, set in a city instead of a forest), and start to think about
heading home.
You guys DO think we should come back
home, right?
8-)
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