Day 4: Linderhof Palace, Germany & Salzburg, Austria

We drove to Linderhoff. Beautiful drive. I was getting pretty good at reading the map and being more positive about my directions to Jeff. But it takes all your time—you can’t look away for too long, or you miss something.

Here is Linderhof. It's another palace that Ludwig had built for himself. (He lived in the castles we visited: Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein).

 These are the gardens and fountains and statues in front of the palace:

 The fountain went off right at noon.

Inside we were only shown a few rooms; the rooms Ludwig mainly used. All the rooms were the crazy Rococo style. Way too decorated and busy. The piano was adorable, but they say he didn’t play very well. There were plaster vines that went up the walls with leaves that stick out here and there; they create a tiny shelf, and tons of little porcelain vases were placed on them, randomly. The little vases were popular for some reason.

In the dining room, the table was lowered (like an elevator) into the floor below. The servants would set it with the food, and it would be raised back up—just so he didn’t have to see them. When he had guests over, he would have a huge vase and giant bouquet of flowers in the middle, so he wouldn’t have to see or talk to them. Of course the king was served first, and he would eat as fast as he could so he could get away, because when the king was finished, everyone was. So the guests usually went hungry; but, they were silly enough to go along with it, so it’s their own faults.

Ludwig tried to copy King Louis of France in many different ways. He had statues of him, quoted him, and tried to do a hall of mirrors, like the one in Versailles. Incredible palace.

After the tour, we went behind the castle, and it had even more statues and things.

Above the palace there was a cave. The rock door would swing open, and inside of the cave, they barely lit it up. 

 There was a swan boat on a pond in there. It's called a grotto and he had Wagner's productions in there. We couldn’t get very good pictures of it, though.

We had one day left after that, so Salzburg was our next stop again, since we didn't see a ton of it the first time because we were trying to find that stinkin' hotel. But on our way there, of course, we were sidetracked by the beautiful German Countryside. Random old barns spotted the fields here and there, and we stopped to take pictures (for you, Ida).

So back to Salzburg we went, into a better hotel. Or so we thought. A storm from the night before had wiped out their wifi. We were going to see the fortress and go to a museum, but most things were closed, and I still had a ton of homework to do.

You can see the white Salzburg fortress at the top of the hill in the middle of the picture.

So we just walked outside for a minute to get dinner. We found kebabs! Wasn’t the best, but Jeff wants another one, so it was good enough:)

We went straight back to the wifi-less hotel. At least it was clean. Of course all of my homework was due that night. They had one computer with an Ethernet cord, so we waited for awhile to use it, but the guy would not get off. So we tried McDonald’s, then Burger King. We finally just went to another hotel. He said if we gave him a star on the hotel survey thing. We agreed…and I think we forgot to do it. Ha. But it didn’t work, either. By the time we got back, the other guy had left and so I got all the instructions for my assignments and put it on a flash drive and worked late into the night…When we go on our next trip I will be done with school, so that will be a relief.